10.19.12
Gaming Facebook
The social networks, along with Google’s hegemony in search, have made a digital world where value is only assigned through numbers of page views, video views, and the now nauseating ubiquity of “likes.”
It’s a winner-take-all digital ecology, a built-in feature of our culture of lickspittle, where there is always incentive to cheat. And earlier in the week I wrote about it once again with regards to a YouTube user who was using video ripped from my account to experiment with view rigging.
In one instance, automated clicks through a Facebook account (or accounts) were the vehicle. In a related matter, many users on Facebook have discovered that it is now apparently trivial for another party to swipe their FB alias/ID for use in generating fraudulent “likes.”
Most recently, this is being used to generate “likes” for Mitt Romney’s page on the social network. The abuse generated a good deal of interest with the result that Mother Jones assigned a reporter to address it. Mother Jones then simply called Facebook which tut-tutted the idea, attributing it to user mistakes when using smartphones to access the network.
Understandably, Facebook has a great deal of life-or-death interest in downplaying malicious exploitation of its “like” infrastructure. It wouldn’t do for advertisers to get the idea that the social network’s biggest selling point is rife with fraud.
Today, it would appear the HackedbyMittRomney analyst, Mark Turner, has added another piece to the story with a post about unused accounts, made people who have since passed away, “liking” Mitt Romney.
As a control, it again raises the spectre that there are applications for Facebook which can be used to game “likes.” Or that there are automated processes among the black hats, used to scan for unused accounts, which are then attacked and taken over by exploiting very poorly chosen passwords based on user name or something similar.
“My daughter’s dead grandmother somehow “liked” Mitt Romney about a month ago…what is going on???”
Hacked by Mitt Romney “Your daughter’s deceased grandmother must have mistakenly liked Romney’s page through Facebook Mobile.”