Fake News May Be a Forever Feature
June 4, 2018
While the world’s big names in social media go on tour to tout the ways in which they are snuffing out fake news, the fake news machine keeps rolling along. Mark Zuckerberg and company can do all the testifying in Washington they want, but that does not mean the criminal element will just curl up and go away. They certainly aren’t going anywhere when there is money to be made and there is plenty of that, according to a surprising BoingBoing story, “It’s Laughably Simple to Buy Thousands of Cheap, Plausible Facebook Identities.”
According to the story:
“[F]or $13, a Buzzfeed reporter was able to buy the longstanding Facebook profile of a fake 23 year old British woman living in London with 921 friends and a deep, plausible dossier of activities, likes and messages. The reporter’s contact said they could supply 5,000 more Facebook identities at any time.”
The danger is that there is essentially no way to really stop this as bot makers get more sophisticated and adjust to Facebook and other social media outlets’ algorithm changes. Some experts even fear that this unstoppable tide of bots will have deadly consequences. We’ll keep watching this story, but don’t have a lot of faith things will get better any time soon.
Patrick Roland, June 4, 2018
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
