Looking at Fake Social Media Profiles
Posted on July 28th, 2008by Michael Gray in Social Media
Somewhere in the middle of all the drama last week was a discussion on fake social media profiles, and as usual the white hat zealots were ready to crucify anyone associated with them, claiming they were yet another tool disparaging the SEO and internet marketing industry. Well it’s my profession responsibility to provide some examples of this nefarious behavior and out some of these high profiles social media spammers …
The first one has nearly 50,000 followers on twitter, is one of the most popular people on facebook, has more than 400,000 myspace friends, and 15,000 youtube friends. Clearly this level of involvement and activity in the social media space can’t be the work of one person, what we’ve got here is a team of people keeping this fake profile running. So who is this nefarious social media spammer …
That’s right none other than the current Democratic Party Presidential Nominee Barack Obama. Are you going to argue that he isn’t using a friend bot, but somehow found the time to friend 52,000 people on twitter? Look at his myspace profile, not only do I believe there is friend bot helping him get 400,000 friends but his top 8 is dominated by astroturfing sock puppets like Women for Obama and Obama Pride.
Now of course I’m being a bit facetious, I don’t actually believe the Obama has anything to do with the day to day operation of any of his official social media profiles, and to think otherwise is being unrealistic. So why are we so gung ho to grab our pitchforks and torches, when we see a marketer or social media consultant doing the exact same thing?
Let’s take another look at a fake social media and forum account, and this time I’m going to pick one a little closer to home. Another favorite target of inflexible white hats are profiles that are maintained or published by more than one person using multiple IP’s. In fact that sort of behavior is down right scandalous in some circle’s and will result in accounts being banned. Who am I pointing the long finger of accusation at this time … none other than the infamous GOOGLE GUY.
See back in 2005 Google was caught cloaking, a debate raged on for a few days, and eventually Google banned themselves (three years later that’s still funny). During the few days that it took to resolve the issue, more than one person was posting under the GoogleGuy account, in fact the tone was so obviously different it was hard to ignore (read the comments). So what happened GoogleGuy was temporarily banned (aaahhh threadwatch those were the days when website owners had cajones and none of this peace, love and unicorn crap we have today). Eventually a deal got worked out and GoogleGuy got reinstated (and the post banning him got pulled cause I’ll be dammed if I could find it … and I really looked too)(added it looks like it was separate incident 2 weeks later that got GG banned, my bad thanks Nick).
So what have we got cloaking a website and multiple people postings for one account … sounds pretty much like those social media spammers every seems so intent on burning at the stake today doesn’t it?
Deciding whether a fake social media profile is or isn’t a spammer isn’t quite as cut and dry as people would like to believe. We enter that weird world that exists between determining intent and ethics. Just last week Valleywag highlighted 50 of the hottest women on Digg and guessed about half of them were fake. You might be able to make some educated guesses as to what someone’s intent was when they created a profile, but at the end of the day it’s just a guess. Debating ethics with anyone on the internet is as close to pointless as you can get, it’s just a waiting game until Godwin’s Law eventually occurs.
Let’s recap fake profiles aren’t the big evil everyone likes to think they are. In fact using a fake profile is sometimes preferable to using your real personal information. I wouldn’t want to have things commingled if at all possible, it would seem to make it much easier to pierce the corporate veil. The problem is users often use narrow interpretations, jump to conclusions about intent, and exercise double standards in judgment in the cases of celebrity, or fame.
I doubt this post will get many to change their opinion on fake social media accounts, so I suggest using the corporate boardroom friendly version and call it a roll account instead. Then it just becomes a semantics debate.
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July 28th, 2008 at 6:00 am
Hey Michael, I think this is the link you were after:
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/2002#comment-9935 (follow it down)
July 28th, 2008 at 7:48 am
Hi Michael, This is fine and all, but your examples are really not what this is all about. SMO’s who create fake profiles to promote other businesses, etc are quite different than obama and googleguy. Those two are easy to understand actually. SMO’s using bots to do this is different as well. You state that debates of ethics online are pointless. I disagree totally. Business ethics are the same online as they are offline.
July 28th, 2008 at 8:51 am
@Doug Heil: so lets be clear I tel you Company X got caught cloaking and has a “community profile” where multiple people post to it.
You’re going to tell me that’s OK for Google but not ok for a Payday Loan company right?
Not the same? So lets assume the one account is Obama for argument’s sake. What About the Women for Obama, is he creating one pretending to be a woman, or someone else creating it to benefit him …
July 28th, 2008 at 9:32 am
Great post Gray Man! I see this as being a very big problem in the future and even see some lawsuits because of it.
July 28th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Obama is awesome, did anyone see him hit that 3 pointer? Gotta love him.
July 28th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
“aaahhh threadwatch those were the days when website owners had cajones and none of this peace, love and unicorn crap we have today”
So true. I loved TW.
July 28th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
I like the examples you used. At least in the case of politics, you’d have to expect fair treatment for all. What if the governor of California (or any state) decided to get a twitter profile and used the same techniques as mentioned above? What if a high profile celeb did it? How about a sports star? Are different social rule sets applied to different groups and if so, why?
July 28th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
This is definitely a problem that is going to increase as time goes on… some of it is definitely a “gray area” it seems.
July 28th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
What are the laws around using a fake (famous) name on a social media site? How does the site know it is not you and do they even care? Can I just be Michael Jackson on facebook?
July 28th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
@SomeOtherGuy: I ‘m not a lawyer so can’t speak to the legalities of that.
However I would assume it would be prudent to block someone whose name isn’t michael jackson from pretending to actually be michael jackson. If micahel jackson had a “designated representitive” posting on his behalf and with his permission then that’s a whole nother ball game.
July 28th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
It’s all about “making friends and influencing people.” My friends are really nice. They don’t start flame wars, they don’t complain when things don’t work, they just requeue and retry. Best of all, they’re really average, they don’t stick out out from the crowd, even when they’re more than 50% of the crowd.
July 28th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
“Inflexible white hat zealots” How very insensitive of you
July 28th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
no link love to the wikipedia? keep on fighting the good fight.
July 28th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
@aimClear: heh there’s no pretense of political correctness here my friend
July 28th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
Great post! I am glad someone else has recognized this. Don’t even get me started on Digg. Haha!
July 28th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
@michael; That’s why I enjoy your perspective. On the SMX LoMo panel I spoke on in SF the audience, panel, and moderator were all grilling the Google rep in the second row. I was thinking of you.
July 28th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
Let’s only take actions into consideration and be done with it. Sheesh. Bot or no bot, but if you get spam, it’s spammer. If you get good news from a candidate, good.
What if a bot were delivering top-notch stories, relevant to your interests, to your account? I bet people would subscribe to such bots on their own will.
July 28th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
i was using a fake profile name for a while on facebook.. im glad facebook disabled me because im sure people want to see real people
July 29th, 2008 at 12:37 am
Hello Michael, this is an interesting post, and I do agree with you to a certain extent. There are a lot of “fake” profiles on Myspace which make regular users look for alternatives. On the other hand many people sometimes make multiple profiles, to join different groups, and do different things…. I’m sure they have their reasons. Its like being involved in the whole social media thing you already know that…. by definition there will be fake profiles… It is like build into the idea of doing things over the internet… where people really don’t know who it is… and sometimes that is what makes it soo popular… because people pose as different genders, races etc.
All of the high profile music pages, are not managed by the actual artist. I don’t think they are spam… but are getting close every day…….They are posting bulletins on an hourly basis, and promoting things….
I guess all I am saying is that it comes with the territory. I have to agree with Doug about Ethics. I think it is important to be ethical no matter what you are doing.
July 29th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Dude. I don’t think your Obama example is all that great. He only has 50,000+ Twitter friends and he’s a presidential candidate on the news every single day. He also promotes his account all over his website. Twitter spammers have way more friends. And his follower/following ratio is pretty close to 1:1. Of course he doesn’t do any of the social media stuff himself. That’s the job for his interactive team. But his social media success probably has more to do with his large amount of enthusiasts rather than manipulation.
July 29th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
@Tanya Ferrell: you miss the point why is it “ok” for Obama to have a twitter account he has nothing to do with but when other people do it they are called spammers. Is pumping a message thru about debt reduction somehow a more self interested action than trying to convince people to vote for you as president?
July 29th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Michael, Barak Obama wasn’t the best example here. It is common knowledge that he doesn’t sleep. In fact, he has a dedicated Social Media Marketing team (all cleared by the government) and they sit in a room for several hours per night (each with multiple PC’s) just pulling up cool twitter and myspace profiles and then he approves them all. Ok, truth be told, Michelle approves a good percentage of them , but they are married, and “two are one”, right? I hope everyone realizes this is a joke.
P.S. - Google Guy is reformed so he doesn’t count either
July 29th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
You would think that by now we would have all learned to take any information from any source with a grain of salt. “Oh my God! Someone misrepresented something on the Internet!”
July 29th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
@David LaFerney: you would think so wouldn’t you
July 30th, 2008 at 1:40 am
Hi Michael, you claim those posts by GoogleGuy were written by different people, but they were in fact all written by the same person.
July 30th, 2008 at 6:01 am
A lot of the people posting don’t realise that using a proxy has been commen for years when large companies send letters they use dummy names for a number of reasons.
When I worked at BT I trained some BT people to post in usenet on uk.telecom and after the fact i wondered if I should have got them to use a pseudonym just in case some nutter went after her. Unfortunately this does happen I bet some of teh high profile female bloggers and vloggers have had creepy letters or stalkers
And in some areas of the UK (NI) being known as a BT employee was not something you would want widely known (the GPO being part of the crown forces and all that)
I also got asked to post a formal BT response on alt.2600 which would have been fun
but probably forever marked me down as a secret squirrel (thats the slag term for the peopel who work with MI5 and SIS on phone comms tapping) if I had used my real name - they actulay decided against this probaly when the ex coppers in SD heard about it.