“There are 83 million fake profiles” over Facebook. Even if you made your cat or dog an account it is still considered a fake account that Facebook wants to disable. The 83 million fake account users are a mixture of innocent and malicious accounts and have been split into three categories; duplicate accounts, user-misclassified and undesirable accounts.
Fake accounts
Almost anyone has encountered a fake account in their time on Facebook but what hardly anyone knows is how to find out if they’re fake and how to prevent bad situations happening with them. There is an app called ‘FB checker’ that can be used to verify your thoughts on a could be “fake account”. This app analyzes the photos to see if there are any duplicates of them and warns the person to tell them if they are fake or not. There are many other ways you can find out if there is a fake account talking to you, some more examples are checking their friends list or using reverse image search which is much like a search engine for images.
There can be positive but also very negative consequences for the victims. Some fake accounts are just fun and games and enjoy making others' lives horrible. Some aftermaths are that people get so caught up in a fake account that they become mentally and emotionally devastated.
Interview with Donna King (Matt Wyatt)
Three girls from Marlborough Girls College made a fake Facebook account for their health project, they based it around the Nelson/Marlborough area and fooled many young teenage girls.
Question 1. Why did you make a fake account on Facebook?
Answer. We made a fake account as a social experiment for our health project on “Online Safety” and we wanted to show just how easy it is for anyone to make a fake profile and start fooling people into believing that the person is real.
Question 2. Around how many people messaged and added you?
Answer. We had probably 50-70 messages, we ended up just muting all of the conversations because we couldn't keep up with them all, not even between the three of us. We added possibly about 75% of our ‘friends’, there weren’t as many requests sent to us than we sent out.
Question 3. How long did it take until someone figured out that you were fake?
Answer. A few days actually, we had some girls sending in screenshots of the guy whose photos we were using. Some also wanted proof that we were real, as in send photos of him doing something for example hold three fingers up etc.
Question 4. Did you get the final outcome you were looking for in your project?
Answer. Yes we did, we fooled quite a lot of people, mostly girls. We did a lot of planning on his background story just in case people got suspicious and asked questions about him. We were proud that there were girls out there that knew something wasn't right and found the proof they needed and confronted ‘Matt’ about it.
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