Are you doing on Facebook what Facebook does on Facebook? They’ll sue you


Pxfuel/Creative Commons CC0 1·0

Here’s quite a funny one for you this Easter weekend: Facebook apparently has filed suit against companies that do the following, according to Social Media Today.

• Companies that sell fake followers and likes, which Facebook has pushed harder to enforce since New York’s Attorney General ruled that selling fake social media followers and likes is illegal last February
• Two different app developers over ‘click injection fraud’, which simulates clicks in order to extract ad revenue
• Two companies over the creation of malware, and tricking Facebook users into installing it in order to steal personal information

In other words, Facebook has filed suit against people who do things that are variations of what Facebook itself does.
   The first. This has long been proven by Veritasium, and one would hope the defendant points out that Facebook has endorsed such behaviour, and that its terms and conditions have generally meant squat. Facebook allows hate groups (hate speech is ‘counter-speech’, they tell me), hates drag queens and kings, drags its heels in removing illegal content (eight clips of the Christchurch massacre are still on there, a year later), and preserves bots, fake accounts and phishing pages, all contrary to what their own terms and conditions say. These happen with such frequency that one might say they are Facebook policy.
   Now, Facebook mightn’t do the second but it certainly extracts ad revenue from customers, and not necessarily fairly. Click fraud? How about audience fraud? That’s been the subject of lawsuits against it. We’ve gone through this before on this blog, least of which is Facebook’s lying about its user numbers. It cites heaps of people but we know among them are bots; and we know that it claims more people in certain demographics than there are people. I’ve said this for a long, long time.
   Third: Facebook tricked users for years into installing a ‘malware scanner’ with purposes it would not go into. But it essentially admitted their scanners collected data from users (as reported in Wired, ‘Facebook tells users when they agree to conduct the scan that the data collected in the process will be used “to improve security on and off Facebook”’—it seems reasonable to conclude this is personal information). The scanner never appeared in one’s installed programs’ list, either, and in my case, knocked out my real antivirus software. We also know that when Facebook accused certain people of having malware, the company was lying. The scanner took a long time to run, so what was it sending back to the mothership? Conclude from all of that what you will, but tricking Facebook users into installing software that is hidden on a user’s PC and takes data off it is right out of a fraudster’s playbook.
   Given the amount of crooked activity that Facebook itself engages in, and the lies its team tells, criminals would be forgiven into thinking that it was a website that collected and ran scams, and that Mark Zuckerberg was a kindred spirit.
   The hypocrisy remains strong at Facebook.


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