We are rushing into a world of social awareness, social politics, and social media entering almost any facet of our lives. But there is no gatekeeper yet. The lack of gatekeepers is enabling fake social media accounts to be set up, maintained and used in ways from just annoying, to truly dangerous.
President Obama recently held the first ever Twitter town hall for a President of the U.S. While he was busy answering questions there were teams of people assessing questions and assisting in the background. The assumption in this situation was that the twitter accounts that were being used to ask questions were actually from real people.
This assumption about reality is probably false, at least a bit. There are already concerns surrounding this twitter town hall, with the possibility of fake accounts being used to pose questions. This follows news of the Fox News Twitter account being "hacked" to send out tweets about the assassination of President Obama. While this is a horrifying example, Fox did correct itself and issued an apology to the White House. However, most of the faked social media accounts are maintained by people or smaller groups without the resources or ethical obligation to either correct false information; or potentially even with the desire to create harm.
As early as 2008, people started focusing on the issues around fake social media accounts, with the initial emphasis being on identity theft and how to protect one's own name. Now the issues are being elevated to politics, security, and even warfare.
The Obama administration is exploring lots of different uses of social media. So are other government agencies. It turns out there are even government contractors who have not only developed software platforms to create and maintain fake social media accounts; but are now attempting to sell such platforms to the government and corporations. The "HBGary" story is just one example of this recent trend. It turns out there are lots of companies making tools like this. But not many are making solutions yet.
There are many stories appearing in multiple media outlets about the emerging problem with faked social media accounts. Even the Pope has weighed in about the problem of faked social media accounts giving the whole issue a level of realness not seen for other technology issues. When the Pope weighs in on something like this it should make people think about it. The U.S. Military has publicly acknowledged that it too has been involved in this, recently hiring a company to do just that.
How to solve this? This is a good question. It is my opinion that we won't see "solutions" to this problem until a faked social media account is used to enact murder, kidnapping or some other nefarious act and the media hops on this as "what can people do about this?" Already smart law firms are creating practices around "fixing the problem of fake social media accounts." If one Google or Bing searches the term "fake social media accounts" there are thousands of stories about the negative side of this, very few mentions if any of ways to combat this emerging problem.
Follow Alan W. Silberberg on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Ideagov
As long as your default mode is that the people you are interacting with on the net aren't who or what they say and are purveying false information unless you know them personally or have access to a darned good fact-checker you should be just fine.
On sites like HuffPo veracity is less important because this is a world of opinions. It doesn't matter who spouts them or why, only that they are on topic. In the process some people may be persuaded to look a little deeper into a subject and have their mind changed in the process.
The immediacy of the Internet and e-mail shrank the divide between citizen and politician. The arrival of social media shrunk the divide even more. The idea that one can engage in conversation with politicians and businesses empowers citizens. The emergence of fake twitter accounts has the potential to undermine the potential of social media.
This speaks to an issue that is dealt with in Chris Brogan's book "Trust Agents", namely that the social web offers an opportunity to return to the basics of good business - deal with people honestly, fairly, and publicly and you will create trust. This principle, as Brogan suggests, is one that applies to anyone: be passionate about your specialty and always seek to be fair and honest in your conversations. It is more then a practical guide to the social web, Brogan's trust agent concept can be seen as a guiding philosophy for online engagement.
Fake accounts and the companies that create them, as well as those who employ them, will damage their credibility. The question is whether the population on the social web can use their considerable power to reverse this trend and ensure that the social web continues to bridge divides and empowers citizens.
Michael Girard
Community
Certainly to the point of real social media accounts being used for mayhem - there is accountability then. The reverse when it is a faked account being used in that way.
- Early 90s: WWW was born…
- By mid 90′s: millions of sites popped up on the Web…
- Mid – late 90s: Yahoo & Google were born to help us to find the right information of the right pages on the Web…
- Early 2000: Social media was born…
- Late 2000: Millions of pages created by people, companies, and organizations on all these social media channels.
- 2011: Deja vu all over again… we are back to early 90’s
That is why I built awesomize.me to accomplish such a mission - the portal to all your existing social media channels.
Elias
CEO & Founder
http://awesomize.me
So you are saying that a VALID social media account can be used to enact MURDER, kidnapping or ... but a fake one must be prevented? WOW, I'm blown away by this circle loop thinking....where is the logic? All I see here is an attempt at MORE control, ABSOLUTE control of everything people do.Where does it all end? Why can't we go back to individual responsibility and quit demanding nanny governments to protect us from every possible scenario of whatever we do in life. It's impossible to achieve anyway, and trying to ruins freedom everywhere.