Spotting fake profiles

A whole lot of talk has been circulating as to tell what content is fake on social media and what is authentic. Truth be told, it is not the easiest thing to do to try and spot fake content on social media platforms because they are basically ‘almost authentic’. Fake users try as much as possible to present themselves in a way that can be believable and acceptable to their prey. As well, pictures can be edited with Photoshop to an unbelievable extreme extent.

Basically to spot fake content on social media, you will have to do some digging and searching so as to not fall prey to this cancer. I will provide steps on how to spot fake profiles on social media from an article that I read recently.

Step 1

Read through the updates posted on the profile of the suspected faker. Accounts that only broadcast or push out updates and content instead of having conversations and engaging with other community members are often fake.

Step 2

Keep an eye out for accounts that repeatedly push out spam.

Step 3

Look for a verification indicator on the social media accounts of high-profile users. Accounts without verification might belong to an impostor.

Step 4

Watch for profiles created to provide phony reviews on social ratings and reviews sites. Fake reviews often do not comment on the specifics of a company's product or service. Instead, they tend to give overwhelmingly positive or negative feedback about only the brand.

Now, these steps are just suggestions that prove to work most of the time but this does not justify that an account or profile may be fake. Whatever the case, there is no harm in going through these steps if you wish to avoid any fake users, accounts and profiles. A fake user can harm an innocent teenager who has only intentions of gaining attention but can be taken in the wrong way. Going through these steps can save one person from going through any harm due to this act of ‘cyberbullying’ which can have extreme consequences.

 Aksana Nikolai (2008) How to spot fake profiles on social Media, Retrieved by, http://smallbusiness.chron.com/spot-social-media-fake-46150.html

Read more ...

Businesses and Social Media!

With the advancement of technology, businesses have to move with the flow and keep up with the face pace at which technology is. The internet is one aspect of technology that is soaring to standards that requires a lot of attention. As individuals use social media to gain attention and feel accepted, businesses also advertise their products and services on social media platforms so as to attract more customers. The more customers a company can get, the higher possibility of products to be sold and the more products sold, the higher the profit.

Businesses are all about making profit and ruling the market to give their competition a tough time. I must say it is a very brilliant and smart idea for a business to advertise its products and services on social media platforms. But, unfortunately this has had major negative effects for some businesses leading to the downfall of such affected businesses. The worst mistake that can happen to a business is the unintentional release of confidential information to the general public through social media.

Accidental Release of Confidential Information

Individuals with inside knowledge of the company might inadvertently blurt out confidential information, damaging the company's competitive advantage. Before social media, a letter sent to the wrong address or even an email that ended up in the wrong inbox could be retrieved and the information kept under wraps. In the world of social media, the sheer numbers mean that once confidential information is out, it's out.

Notice this is just one example of how social media can damage the success of a business? Information is so vital to the extent that if it gets into the hands of the wrong party, it will most definitely bring failure to a business. All hope is not lost as businesses can reverse this trend of being negatively affected when trying to advertise on social media.

Setting out policies in place can deter unfaithful users from engaging in unscrupulous behaviour on social media platforms. Policies will prevent and hinder these individuals from attempting to cause harm to a business. Better yet, businesses are protected from their competition as their policies will set a standard by law to which they are supposed to follow.

"Companies who fail to provide guidelines for how their employees should conduct themselves online are dealing with a ticking time bomb," says Brandon Harig, social media strategist, Identity, an integrated public relations firm.

"By establishing expectations of how employees represent themselves online, both during work hours and after, brands not only help educate their staff on potential problems, they create a fallback when someone goes too far," Harig says.

1. Jennifer Lonoff Schiff (2013, October). Not having a social media policy, Retrieved from, http://www.cio.com/article/2381554/social-media/15-big-social-media-mistakes-companies-make-and-how-to-avoid-them.html

2. Catherine Lovering (2010).  Accidental release of confidential information, Retrieved from, http://smallbusiness.chron.com/negative-effects-social-media-business-25682.html

Read more ...

Fake content and Accounts on Facebook

Fake content and Accounts on Facebook

Facebook is a social media website where we can connect with people from different areas of your life. and we use Facebook every day. There are billions users every day and we can see many different information from them. They provide enough advertisement for the people. Even though our life has connected with Facebook, but the information we get from Facebook are not all real. There are lots of fake content and fake accounts.

Fake acconts- There could be no. of reason why one create a Fake account on Facebook. Some of them do it to hard others while others do it for fun and not particularly annoying anyone in that process. 

• Spamming and promotion of their stuff.
• A lots of people have two FB account, one is real and other is for testing purposes.
• Then there are people who had 4-5 FB accounts just to get more promotional offers from FB. (For example Freecharge give 50 rs free recharge when you login with your FB account)
• Some advertised make fake account for displaying ads on Facebook. (not sure why they do that)

From the research , we can find out Facebook Targets 76 Million Fake Users In War On Bogus Accounts,

In its annual report, Facebook said that the number of duplicate accounts on its network had risen to 5 percent of all accounts in Q4 2012, up from 4.8 percent in Q2 2012. However, the number of accidentally misclassified accounts and the number of abusive accounts (run by spammers and the like) has declined.

Overall, the total percentage of fake accounts declined from 8.7 percent to 7.2 percent. In whole numbers, the number of duplicate accounts went up from about 45.8 million to 52.8 million; but the total number of fake accounts (which includes abusive and misclassified accounts) declined from 83 million to 76 million over the last six months(Jim,2013)

Fake advertisement

When we use facebook, we can find there are lots od ad come up , this is a one way for the facebook making money, but  some of what we see the ad on the facebook  are fake ad, or the link give to us are not real. the ad we clicked on may be for counterfeit goods. That is some people take advantage social media tool to send their product to people. At first sight, the ads look legitimate and lead to websites that look like real ones, the researchers warned, potentially tricking average Facebook users into believing they're buying real products without realizing the danger. 

Facebook should do more, and must do more against this,"We should be careful when we receive the fake content from Facebook 

• Jim Edwards(2013,March). 
Facebook Targets 76 Million Fake Users In War On Bogus Accounts, Retrived from 

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-targets-76-million-fake-users-in-war-on-bogus-accounts-2013-2

Read more ...

Create Fake content and identify the Fake fans

Facebook allow people to report links to fake stories.

Today, Facebook  has add the ability to flag a news story as a hoax. When you see something that is obviously not real like a made-up celebrity death or fake starup, you can choose to report posts as a “false news story.”

People like to create some fake post to prank friends, or attract people to view their information. Actually there are some tool we can use to create your own fake post.

Did your friend say something dumb on Facebook and make you want to share a fake version of the status more publicly? Or did something trigger you to think of a hilarious fake post that you just need to create? Well, you’re in luck. There are a bunch of great tools to quickly create fake Facebook status updates, chats, news feeds and more.

The following tools are just perfect if you’re a prankster and you want to fool your friends or if you’re looking to create the ultimate joke for a Reddit post. You’ll no doubt be inspired to create something while you check them out.(makeuseof,nd)

Lets share one tool called Simitator

Simitator

Simitator can generate a Facebook status in much the same way as the others, but it can also create a fake Facebook chat log. So, if you want to make it look like you’ve been chatting to celebrities or to pretend your friends said something embarassing, this is the tool for you. But obviously, you could easily make your friends hate you if you go too far.

Using Simitator is straight-forward, with a live preview of your work so far featuring on the side. The jpeg you download at the end is a little bit fuzzy for some reason, but you can always take a screenshot of the preview instead.

If you’re also looking for fake status generators for other social networks and devices, Simitator works for Twitter, Snapchat, Yahoo Answers, iOS texts and more. Get creative!(makeuseof,nd)

How to identify the fake content on the social median such as facebook

In recent years, online social networks such as Facebook, Twitter an Google+ have become a global mass phenomenon A study recently published by Facebook (2012) indicates that there were about 901 million monthly active users on the platform at the end of March 2012. Therefore, Facebook is one of the largest online social networks. Not only common users but also celebrities, politicians and other people of public interest use social media to spread content to others.  As we used fackbook there is a 3ways to if a facebook page has a fakefans. Link:(http://www.pammarketingnut.com/2013/03/how-to-determine-if-a-facebook-business-page-has-fake-fans/)

makeuseof(nd.)4 Brilliant Ways To Make Fake Facebook Status Updates [Weekly Facebook Tips] Retrieved from http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-brilliant-ways-make-fake-facebook-status-updates-weekly-facebook-tips/

Read more ...

How Fake Content Spreads

Social media has grown exponentially over the years. With the growth of social media being this large there are bound to be some people who want to cause chaos and confusion during your day. People can do this by creating fake content and posting it to social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit for the people with the untrained eye to believe it and continue to spread it around. This can be a problem within social media because people can spread the lies and hoaxes, while keeping all the real news at the bottom of the barrel for nobody to see.

If everything starts at the bottom why do the lies get spread faster than the truth you might ask yourself? Media Shift is trying to educate people in the world of journalism. They wrote created a blog titled “How Lies Spread Faster than Truth: A study of Viral Content” about how fake content spreads so much faster than real content. In the article they give a few reason why.

1. “Many news sites apply little or no basic verification to the claims they pass on. The story’s point of origin, once traced back through the chain of links, is often something posted on social media or a thinly sourced claim from a person or entity.
2. Lack of verification makes journalists easy marks for hoaxsters and others who seek to gain credibility and traffic by getting the press to cite their claims and content.
3. News organizations are inconsistent at best at following up on the rumors and claims they offer initial coverage. The potential for traffic is also greatest when a claim or rumor is new. So journalists jump fast, and frequently, to capture traffic. Then they move on.
4. News organizations reporting rumors and unverified claims often do so in ways that bias the reader toward thinking the claim is true.
5. News organizations utilize a range of hedging language and attribution formulations to convey that information they are passing on is unverified. These subtleties result in misinformed audiences.”(Craig.2015)

Many people like to share what they want to hear, whether it be real or fake it doesn’t matter to them. This can be a problem because most of the time fake content is created just for what the people want to hear. A few examples of fake content posts could be funny “Pig Rescues Goat”, or to create awareness “Mexican Red Rump Tarantula Missing in Brooklyn”, and even just random information “Post a Facebook Copyright Status to Protect Your Information”. Fake content can be a cause for concern (as discussed in a separate blog entry) as it can be filled with scammers and con artists trying to get personal gains. 




Craig.S(2015.February),How Lies Spread Faster Than Truth: A Study of Viral Content Retrieved from http://mediashift.org/2015/02/how-lies-spread-faster-than-truth-a-study-of-viral-content/

Read more ...