‘Ghost’ Facebook accounts

By Alex P. Vidal

“All one needs to do is read-books, magazines, research the Internet – and pay attention to the influencers in their lives to discover the myriad people of strong moral character who have and still are making positive, meaningful contributions and differences in our world.”—Zig Ziglar

SINCE they don’t have the “profile pictures”, the so-called fake Facebook accounts that surfaced recently and sent a tidal wave of uproar among the Filipinos should be called as “ghost” accounts.

If Facebook has “accepted” its creation, a “fake” account becomes legitimate in any standard if allowed to function as a normal social media inhabitant.

Some owners of authentic Facebook accounts, by the way, don’t use profile pictures but their friends and relatives are very much aware of this from the very beginning, since they have been interacting using these profile picture-less accounts for a long time.

Also, there are authentic Facebook accounts that include the owners’ middle initials while most, if not all, of the ghost accounts created recently don’t have them.

Thus, ghost Facebook accounts are useless.

Even if Facebook authorities won’t remove them, these bogus accounts won’t serve the purpose of why they were created.

No normal person will lend his credence and accommodate these weird Facebook accounts.

The fact that they don’t have the profile pictures and most people with authentic Facebook accounts have already protested by warning they only maintain one account, these ghost accounts lose their credibility right away.

 

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Some of those alarmed and scandalized by the sudden mushrooming of ghost Facebook accounts have linked it to the ongoing debate on the anti-terrorism bill, which the proponents believe will soon be signed into law by President Rodrigo Roa Duterte.

A progressive congressman feared these ghost accounts could be used as “tanim ebidensia” (planting of evidence) whatever it may have meant.

This can only be possible, I think, if the “planting of evidence” will be successfully placed on authentic accounts which appears to be implausible without the full cooperation of the owners.

Some of the so-called “trolls” are reportedly willing participants in inflammatory and digressive debates in the social media and most of them may be aware they’re doing these provocative roles in accordance to the wishes of certain political personalities.

Interestingly, Facebook shut down hundreds of fake accounts, pages and groups that misled users, including some that used artificial intelligence to generate fake profile pictures mostly in the United States on December 20, 2019.

It’s the first time researchers who studied the group of account have seen AI-generated images used on such a large scale, raising concerns about how the social network will tackle this problem ahead of the November 2020 US presidential election.

 

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The company also reportedly took down fake accounts from the photo-sharing service Instagram, which it owns.

It pulled down 610 Facebook accounts, 89 pages, 156 groups and 72 Instagram accounts that were from the US and Vietnam. About 55 million accounts followed at least one of the pages and most of these followers were from outside the US, according to C/Net writers Queenie Wong and Corinne Reichert.

“We’re constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity,” Facebook said in a blog post. “We don’t want our services to be used to manipulate people.”

The company said it removed the accounts for engaging in foreign and government interference or “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” which means that whoever was running the accounts misled others about their identity and what they were doing.

Targeting US citizens as well as Vietnamese, Spanish and Chinese-speaking audiences, the fake accounts “typically posted memes and other content about US political news and issues including impeachment, conservative ideology, political candidates, elections, trade, family values and freedom of religion,” Facebook said.

In other cases, fake accounts used photos from stock images or glamor shots found online.

Another network of fake accounts reportedly originated from the country of Georgia.

Facebook removed 39 Facebook accounts, 344 pages, 13 groups and 22 Instagram accounts, which collectively had more than 450,000 followers and members.

The network pretended to be media, political parties and activists, posting about news, political issues and political criticism.

Twitter reportedly shared data of 5,929 accounts originating from Saudi Arabia that it removed for manipulating information.

“These accounts represent the core portion of a larger network of more than 88,000 accounts engaged in spammy behavior across a wide range of topics,” Twitter said. “We have permanently suspended all of these accounts.”

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo)