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Who likes your page? No, really - Navigating between likes and fakes in social media

The 28- year-old Cristina Apostol works in Bucharest and like many Romanians of her generation, owns accounts on Facebook, Yahoo Messenger (YM), MySpace and Hi5.com. In fact, she has three or four YMs, two Hi5s and two MySpaces. When I spoke to her recently she said she might soon open another Facebook account for herself - “because you never know when you might need it.”

For some media outlets, success is now measured not only by print circulation, audience ratings or unique online visitors, but also by the number of people who click on the “Like” button on their pages on social media platforms. 

It’s only been one year since Facebook started to allow other websites to place the button on their pages, but it feels as if it’s been around forever. Reportedly 10,000 websites are adding the “Like” button every day.

Modern journalists are embracing social media networks for the numbers and the interactivity they provide. But they should beware: some of the likes they get may not come from real people.

Cristina Apostol has created multiple fake accounts. Photo credit: Cristina Apostol

Who creates fake profiles?

People create fake accounts for a lot of different reasons. For Apostol, it all started a few years ago when she decided to help a male friend who believed that a girl was using charms (yes, as in witchcraft) on him.

Apostol didn’t think that the girl would confess out of her own initiative so she decided to spoof her. She created an account on Yahoo Messenger that gave the impression that it belonged to a drum and bass DJ well known for his pleasant personality.

Armed with this arresting identity, (s)he contacted the suspected witch on Yahoo Messenger. (S)he told her (s)he had found her address through Hi5.com, a popular social network in Romania, and that (s)he had fallen for her. Within three days the girl had told Apostol the story of her life and given her the confirmation that she had indeed tried to bewitch her friend.

Apostol has performed similar schemes since. “When it comes to the Internet and online identity, people are very naïve,” she says. “Practically, if you say you are someone, it’s as if you really are that person.”

Apart from people who just want to have fun or play private eye on the Net like Apostol, there are those who engage in popular online games such as Farmville or Mafia Wars on Facebook. By creating fake profiles, they are able to add more friends in their network. The more friends the more extra points.

Many organisations open personal accounts on Facebook instead of company pages. As a result they appear as people. I have received friend requests from such “people” as Car Body Parts.

Things can also get more serious. Teachers and parents sometimes create fake accounts in order to oversee the online life of teenagers.

US federal agents reportedly use Facebook undercover to spy on suspects. Policemen in India have created hundreds of fake identities on the social network in order to monitor young separatists in the Kashmir region.

According to Computer Weekly, cybercriminals sell fraudulently obtained bulk login information to access hundreds of thousands of Facebook accounts. They also use special programmes to create fake profiles that can be traded on the black market.

The Romanian blogger Andrei Crivat wrote in February that some people have hundreds of fake accounts on Facebook, which they use in contests that count likes as votes. Say someone offers a prize for the picture that collects the most likes. A user with multiple accounts will be able to click on the “Like” button numerous times and thus collect enough likes to win. Such users also trade or sell their likes. Crivat’s post about the “Like” mafia on Facebook has been liked 227 times so far and generated almost 60 comments, including some from Internet users who contributed their own stories and experiences regarding such schemes.

How to tell a fake profile from a real one

Fake likes can be very troublesome for media organisations, especially for those who invest real effort into engaging real people on their social media pages. The editors of Decat o Revista (DoR), a new Romanian magazine with an impressive following of real users on Facebook, were dumbfounded last March by an invasion of new fans who started flocking to their page by the thousands.

DoR’s fan base on Facebook shot up from 20,000 to 31,000 within two weeks. Strangely enough, editor Cristian Lupsa said, most of these new fans appeared to come from Indonesia, Turkey and Latin America, while the magazine targets audiences in Romania. Even more strangely, these profiles had no friends and used obviously fake profile pictures.

“We were bothered by this,” said Lupsa, “even though from the outside all one could see is that it’s just a lot of people.” The editors started to manually eliminate thousands of “fake Indonesians”. At some point, though, they were overwhelmed. By April 25, DoR’s Facebook page has gathered more than 39,000 likes, and, according to Lupsa, 10-12,000 of those come from “fake “Indonesians”.

“I don’t know what to do, I don’t know where they come from,” he says. He wrote to Facebook about the issue but is still waiting for an answer.

Website administrators generally use pieces of code called widgets in order to easily install buttons such as “Like” on their sites. Somebody told the DoR staff that the fake likes might come from bots, pieces of software designed to roam the Internet and perform various repetitive tasks. In this case, the bots might be engineered to use the widgets to generate multiple likes. The DoR editors deactivated the widget on their website, but the fake likes have kept coming.

Unofficial estimates regarding the ratio of fake profiles range from one to two percent to one third of all Facebook profiles. Sture Nyberg, an online marketing coach, writes that 27 percent of all Facebook accounts are fake, but he fails to mention any source.

Even though there are more than 600 million active accounts functioning globally, the social platform still promotes itself as reaching “over 500 million people.”

Facebook encourages people to report fake accounts and employs a “User Operations team that reviews these reports and takes action as necessary,” according to a statement published last July on BusinessInsider.com. “We also have technical systems in place to flag and block potential fakes based on name and anomalous site activity,” the statement reads. For example, users who send lots of messages to people who are not their friends, or whose friend requests are rejected at a high rate, are marked as suspect. Plus, the company has built grey lists of names usually associated with fake accounts and makes it hard for people with unusual names to open an account.

This policy seems to be enforced in the US where for instance, a user by the name of Istanbul found herself locked out of her account after using it for two years. But in other countries, such as Romania, it looks like anything goes, as obvious fake names, like the Romanian word for testicle, or characters from Latin American soap operas, pop up on Facebook all the time.

Sometimes, the reporting system can hurt people with legitimate accounts, including journalists. The well-known Romanian TV journalist Lucian Mindruta could not access his account on 3 March because somebody reported it as fake. He was able to use it again several days later after sending his credentials to Facebook.

Romanian TV journalist Lucian Mindruta was locked out of his Facebook account
after a prankster reported it as fake

Most social media experts I spoke to agree however that fake accounts are as yet just a minor issue. After all, DoR has become a local phenomenon on Facebook by being able to engage real people, not “fake Indonesians.”

Online contests using the “Like” functionality as a voting system show lack of creativity on the part of certain marketers and encourage some people to create fake accounts, says Nicolae-Augustin Rogoz, business developer with Holosfind Performance, a Romanian digital marketing firm.

Such contests attract “bounty hunters” who create fake accounts in order to generate more likes, he explains. But they fail to effectively engage users, who generally lose interest when the contest is over. User engagement should be driven by shared values, experiences and vision, Rogoz believes.

Many journalists are used to receiving comments from anonymous users on their websites. Facebook and other social media services on the contrary encourage people to use their real identity online. But as the question of fake accounts reveals, the number of likes a page attracts is not necessarily as important as the quality of the interaction it generates with visitors.

In journalism, engaging with the public translates into creating a real conversation around topics that really matter to people. To real people.

Tags: decat o revista, ethics, facebook, fake profile, internet, like button, romania, social media,

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