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 ...

The Effects of Fake Views

Have you ever went onto any form of social media and saw a random video that has no reason to be at the top of your news feed? Have you ever wondered how that video has become so popular and why people would be watching this video? This can be because people can purchase fake views to push there videos to the top and into the “trending now” section where people are most likely to be looking for videos. This causes more people to watch the video and become “viral” as many people like to call it.

This isn’t just a video specific problem. People can buy page views for their website so they can show off the numbers and get some ad revenue as they pull in more views because of the inflated numbers they have. Live streamers also can face this problem. There may be view bots in the live streamers channel to make them reach the top of the website which causes real people to want to tune in. (Dan.2013)This is very unethical and creates an unfair environment for the other people trying to create content.

These fake views are unfair for the people who work really hard on the content they publish. It also makes it difficult to find good content for the viewers. An example could be something like this. John and Joe are both aspiring food critics. John works day and night to try and create the most interesting review of each restaurant he visits for his viewers filled with in depth knowledge about everything about the restaurant. Joe takes 5 minutes out of his day to write about a meal he just ate without any passion in the writing. Joe pays $10 to buy 50,000 page views each time he posts, causing him to be put on the front page of all social media. This causes people to click on Joes reviews to gain more attraction where he eventually gets triple his views and getting more revenue. John on the other hand is sitting at the bottom with only 100 people who all enjoy his content.

Fake views effect both the viewer and the content creators in the industry. It gives the viewers the possibility of lackluster content. It gives the content creator a huge advantage over everyone else because he bought his views. Everyone wants to be on top but it should be the people who create the best content to be on top as opposed to people who pay for it. 




Dan,L(2013,January) How to spot fake youtube views Retrieved from http://videocontestnews.com/2013/01/25/how-to-spot-fake-youtube-views/

Read more ...

Fake vs Real

Social media is huge. You can find news about anything you want to know about. People share news all the time with each other, but that doesn’t mean it is real. Real content is what actually happened, while fake content is what people made up. Fake content could be about anything such as fake disasters, fake stories about celebrates, or even click baits to lead you to a virus.  There are a lot of people out there that like to create fake content just for personal enjoyment. People that create these things are often referred to as “trolls” around the internet.

Fake content can affect people in many different ways depending on what they are using it for. Some examples of how it can affect people would be, students using it as a source for information, people sending money to help fund fake research, and tricking people into thinking someone is a criminal. Fake sites can try and take your money, take any information they can get from you, or just get personal gain from your visit to the site. These sites can appear to be very real and hard to tell the difference between fake and real.

There are a few different ways to find out if what you are reading is actually fake or real content. The Learning Network, a blog created by the New York Times to help teach people about stuff around the world has given tips on how to tell if the source is really reliable. They like to use that acronym IMVAIN which stands for.

“Independent sources are preferable to self-interested sources.

Multiple sources are preferable to a report based on a single source.

Sources who Verify or provide verifiable information are preferable to those who merely assert.

Authoritative and/or Informed sources are preferable to sources who are uninformed or lack authoritative background.

Named sources are better than anonymous ones.” (KATHERINE,2015)

If you follow these rules when looking at your news articles they should help you find if your source of information is really reliable. A few tips I can give you to stay secure on the internet would have to be to never give away your credit card information to a website before searching around about the site. Don’t give away any personal information to anyone unless 100% necessary. Lastly don’t fall for those ads where you can “win a free car” or something, it is more than likely a virus. If you can follow all these tips then you should be able to find out if what you are reading is real or fake.

KATHERINE,S(2015,October)  Skills and Strategies | Fake News vs. Real News: Determining the Reliability of Sources Retrieved from http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/02/skills-and-strategies-fake-news-vs-real-news-determining-the-reliability-of-sources/

Read more ...

How the love of Social media affects us

Our lives are basically revolved around social media. This present day and age in which we live is centred around the internet. 80% of our use of the internet is for social media. Social Media is used for getting in contact with friends and family who are miles away, advertising our businesses, sharing important information and creating awareness of an event and so many more. Our present day lives are run by social media. Unfortunately, we live in a time where social media forces us to change who we really are and what we really stand for, to please the general public. Oh how the use of the filters on Instagram can take a very simple and unusual event, and create it into a masterpiece of enjoyment, celebration and fulfilment!

 We desire so much to be accepted by the standards of the society that we forget who we really are and it affects the way we think in our societies. Not truly believing in who you are, reduces productivity in the sense that; we have fed our minds so much with the ideology that a filter will make us look better, or changing our relationship status will make us more respectable and this leads to less self belief and acknowledgement further leading to inadequate production. The negativity of social media is killing us slowly and the more we feed into the thoughts on people’s beliefs and forget what we stand for, the more we live our live for others.

One article from Jay Baer had him saying ‘It’s not an illusion. We really are doing more with each 24 hours, as technology enables (or forces) us to interact and intersect and do and consume with unprecedented volume and vigor. We live our lives at breakneck speed because we can, because we feel we have to keep up, and because every macro and micro breeze blows in that direction’(Jay,n.d). As sad as it is, He speaks the truth. Technology is moving so fast to the extent that we all have to keep to make ends meet, literally! Hackers will keep phishing information in any way possible just to get those few dollars that will keep them through the day, teenage boys and girls will keep posting obscene pictures with the best of filters to get attention and approval from society, businesses will keep lying and deceiving the general public so as to attain more attention to their products and services. The negativity of social media brings positivity to its users. This is the sad truth we live with in the year 2016, which we all know to a great extent but still love the use of Social Media.

(HigtonBros,2014)

Jan,B(n.d) Social Media, Pretend Friends, and the Lie of False Intimacy Retrieved from http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-tools/social-media-pretend-friends-and-the-lie-of-false-intimacy/

HigtonBro(2014,Jun) What's on your mind? Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxVZYiJKl1Y

Read more ...

The youth and fake social media content.

The youth are the major target group for fake content on social media only because the youth is part of the ‘technology generation’. The internet is used mostly by teens and basically students exposing them to the dangers of fake social media content. The following content can be used to steal or misappropriate identity. Full name (particularly your middle name), Date of birth (often required), Home town. Relationship status, School locations and graduation dates, 

Pet names

Other affiliations, interests and hobbies

In a study, it was recognized that:

• 91% post a photo of themselves, up from 79% in 2006.
• 71% post their school name, up from 49%.
• 71% post the city or town where they live, up from 61%.
• 53% post their email address, up from 29%.
• 20% post their cell phone number, up from 2%.
• 92% post their real name to the profile they use most often.
• 84% post their interests, such as movies, music, or books they like.
• 82% post their birth date.
• 62% post their relationship status.
• 24% post videos of themselves.(2013,May)

All this information is used by teens on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat, Instagram, Skype and others. Although this information is accurate and harmless, it tends to serve a different purpose for ‘fake’ users. To provide a very broad example of how teens are affected with fake social media content, I will demonstrate this with the biggest social media platform, FACEBOOK. With over one billion users worldwide, Facebook serves as a continent on its own. Basically any and everybody over the age of 13years, with access to the internet can be a part of these enormous platform. Out of these users, so many fake accounts are created and with no way of our teens knowing the difference between a real account and a fake account, they may fall prey to a predator.

Most teenage girls tend to seek attention in their early teenage years and will 70% of the time fall prey to these fake users. Such users create fake accounts and appear as appealing individuals of the same age and interest to these young girls. These attacks are not only on teenage girls but on boys as well. This cancer is one which is out of the hands of parents and even that of the management behind Facebook. All accounts will not be able to be verified as authentic or fake all the time, as Facebook gets new users each and everyday. The only way to control this is for parents to monitor the friends their kids have on Facebook. As well as the interactions in which take place. To prevent your child from falling prey to this cancer that is affecting the global community, fight against this by monitoring your kids use on Facebook and all other social media platforms. 

Mary,M, AMANDA,L, SANDRA, C, URS G, MAEVE D, AARON S & MEREDITH B (2013,May)  

Teens, Social Media, and Privacy Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/05/21/teens-social-media-and-privacy/

 

Read more ...

Fake Content on Social Media

Social media has taken the world by storm. With platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram attracting millions of users daily since their development. People loved the ability to personalize their pages to fit their personal needs. But with the growing success of these media giants, there will always be people taking advantage of their individuality and personal features to create marketing or personal gain. These are the worst type of people because they're the reason for the random friend requests, fake advertisements, popups, and fake profiles we fall for (which is called "phishing" or getting "cat fished", but I'll talk about that later) that annoy us so much.

I personally like to call these people "internet warriors", a term normally associated with internet bullies, but I feel like there are many similarities between the two. For instance, internet bullies hide behind their computers in search of inferior victims to fall for their ridicule and humiliation, and the people creating this fake content are doing much of the same, they still are trying to make the other person look bad, whether that's by making them fall for their fake profile or their totally illegitimate advertisement that could potentially lose you your money and dignity. Just terrible I know.

Bob Hoffman, a veteran ad executive, industry critic, and author of the blog the Ad Contrarian, said "I can think of nothing that has done more harm to the Internet than ad tech". How often people fall victim to the scams placed variously all over our favourite websites. Bob continues to say "Nobody knows the exact number, but probably about 50% of what your spending online is being stolen from you." Although speculation, he isn't that far off. The FBI reported that just in the third quarter of 2009, internet thieves have stolen more than $25 million over the internet alone. That number most likely has only gone up since then with greater technology being invented every year.(David,March)

With this generation spending more and more time using the internet and social media it is important that people know that not everything you read or see is true. Over the course of this blog, my colleagues and I will be discussing many different topics concerning fake content on the internet. We will go over the groups of people most targeted by fake content, how to spot "fake" content, fake content vs. real and how to distinguish between the two, how fake content spreads over the internet, the effects of fake views, fake content on facebook and the growing popularity of "phishing". (n.d)

David N(March) Cyber Crooks Leave Traditional Bank Robbers in the Dust Retrieved from  http://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/david-nelson/

Ben E, Michael R, David K &Joshua B(n.d) Marketers thought the Web would allow perfectly targeted ads.Hasn’t worked out that way. Retrieved from http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-click-fraud/

Read more ...