Serendipity35

So, a real friend on Facebook messages you to say " I got another friend request from you yesterday which I ignored so you may want to check your account.”  What's going on? Should you "hold your finger down and forward the message?" 

I'm reading many articles that say these kinds of messages are a scam. And other articles that say they are real. Both are true. I received messages from a cloned account of a friend. It didn't say to forward it, but it did try to get me to take the bait on a money scam.

Facebook cloning is when scammers create a fake Facebook profile by using images and other information stolen from a legitimate user’s real Facebook profile. That cloned account looks very much like the genuine profile because it uses photos and information that the victim has made “public.”  Using that cloned fake profile, friend requests are sent to people on the real accounts friends list.

Why would you accept a second friend request? Maybe you don't remember ever friending this person. I accepted one because the person who was cloned was someone who very rarely used Facebook, so I assumed she was new. Maybe you thought you had "unfriended" that person by mistake or on purpose and now wanted to reconnect. Maybe you have so many Facebook friends that you can't keep track. Maybe you want friends so badly that you just accept any requests.

What warned me was that I was the only friend listed on this cloned account. I reported the account to Facebook and warned the real person. The fake was taken down.

Facebook itself is not doing this, so don't blame them this time, though they need to put some further privacy policies in place. The cloning is being done by people with bad intentions. In many cases they are trying to lure people into scams offering the chance to "win" large sums of money. The one that I was offered said that my "friend" had gotten $500,000 from the government and my name was on "the list" to also get money. Other people have gotten messages that claim the victim has been stranded in a foreign country and needs a short-term loan to get out of trouble. 

The scams are not new. These scams went from snail mail and phone calls to email and now social media.

Some of the warnings you're seeing now are false. It has become a meme. Some warnings are legitimate. Either way, it is a good idea to protect your identity on and off the Internet.

This article on "How To Protect Your Facebook Account From Cloning" has some good general privacy hygiene for Facebook. 

Hide Your Friends List - You have that ability, so use it. Yes, I like being able to see the friends of my friends (who may be potential friends for me) but that is your choice.
Run A “Privacy Checkup” by clicking the “Lock” icon at the top right of your Facebook profile. You should probably set them to “Friends” or “Only Me” rather than “Public”:

Facebook also allows you to view your profile as the “Public” sees it. That public includes all the scammers. Your photos would be the way the way a cloner would start making the fake version of you.

If you discover that your Facebook account has actually been cloned, report the fake account to Facebook and, yes, then warn friends not to accept any friend requests that look like they came from you.

The web went mobile years ago. Video went mobile with smartphones. Social media went mobile soon after. And next social media went video crazy.

Facebook and Instagram (which it owns) have launched a separate app called IGTV. This is an app for watching long-form, vertical video from Instagram creators. It is a video hub, but it is not for episodic, TV-like content.

But Facebook is interested in that kind of content.

With Facebook's 8 billion daily video views per day, Facebook doesn't want text - which is still a huge part of the Facebook experience - to dominate.  They are moving towards an even more video-oriented site.

They started by introducing a new Watch section to a small group of US users. The new platform differs from  IGTV which targets Instagram’s younger audience. That audience is made up of a lot of Generation Z who were NOT brought up on TV. Instagram says "We've learned that younger audiences are spending more time with amateur content creators and less time with professionals." 

Instagram is supposed to be meeting with online creators hoping to lure them into the new video platform. They are looking for things like 10 minute vlogs, not extended programs. On IGTV, creators are the channels.

instagram-press.com/blog/2018/06/20/welcome-to-igtv/

newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/08/introducing-watch-a-new-platform-for-shows-on-facebook/

Do you think of social media sites, such as Twitter, as a place for debate? Yes, I know that people argue about things on Twitter and Facebook, but is that what you would consider to be "debate?"

There is a fairly new start-up that has been around for about a year and wants to offer you a place for more civilized debate or discussion than the current angry "discussion" on social media.

The site is Kialo (Esperanto for “reason”) and hopes to prohibit the shouting, rudeness or irrationality that is currently part of the Trumpian Twitterverse that has evolved.

Some have called Kialo an "Internet Unicorn" and "The Utopian Fantasy of Rational Debate On the Web."

You can just read the discussions on topics of the day, and you can take part as a debater.  You may even be designated as a moderator. It is not for commenting on others posts.

It's a nice idea, but I don't see it becoming a huge site on the scale of Facebook or Twitter. I don't think people who are on social media really want debate. They want to say how they feel and they want others to agree with them (as in getting a "Like" for what they have said). And there is a smaller percentage of those people who actually want to argue with strangers. 

And argument is not exactly debate - and many arguments are not a civil "set of reasons given with the aim of persuading others that an action or idea is right or wrong." They are the other kind of argument - when people have opposite views and express it in a a heated or angry way. Did we learn nothing from Monty Python?

I have read that some teachers and professors are using private areas of Kialo for class discussions and exercises in critical thinking and reasoning.

For everyday debaters and for schools and universities, access is free. The site does not carry ads. They say they do not sell data.

Kialo uses the term “claim” rather than "argument" and contributors sometimes not only make a claim but also post counterpoints to their own claim. Of course, a good debater does need to know both sides in order to debate well.

This month Twitter started removing tens of millions of suspicious accounts, especially those that are identified as bots and fake accounts.

That means that users may be finding that they have lost followers.  Of course, if you were a user who inflated your followers by buying followers, I'm glad your numbers dropped. And if I lost a few who were fake, all the better.

Twitter declined to provide an exact number of affected users, but said it would drop tens of millions of questionable accounts and that would reduce the total combined follower count on Twitter by about 6 percent.

Full disclosure - I own Twitter stock and though I don't want to see the stock drop, I do want reform. Twitter has far fewer users than Facebook or Google, but has also come in for criticism for allowing abuse and hate speech and for playing a role in the Russian influence during the 2016 election.

Twitter did not turn a profit until the final quarter of last year, and Twitter Inc.'s stock slipped 10% last week after the news about the suspended accounts came out. Those accounts impact the company's tally of monthly active users, a key growth metric that is closely monitored by Wall Street investors. The MAU (monthly active users) jumped to 336 million in April, up from 330 million in the previous quarter.

I have always told my social media clients that followers is not the best metric to measure the success of your social media strategy. Everyone wants followers, but I get new followers every day on multiple networks that I can see are only following me in the hopes that I will follow them back. 

As others have observed -

Removing bots enables Twitter to take control of this situation, and improve the credibility of their metrics – as social media marketing becomes a more significant element in modern business, people are also becoming more informed about what those numbers actually mean, and how to identify real influence, as opposed to those who’ve bought their way to prominence.

If people repeatedly see influencer lists filled with people who they know have cheated the system, that reduces their trust in such data, while it would also skew Twitter’s algorithm which favors content from more prominent users, and with higher engagement stats (both of which can be gamed).