Facebook continues to give in to fake accounts, much like the UK with COVID-19
At the beginning of July I noticed Facebook had changed its reporting options. Gone is the option labelled âFake accountâ, replaced by âHarmful or spamâ. Itâs a small change that, I believe, is designed to get Facebook off the hook for failing to remove fake accounts: since you canât report them, then you canât say theyâve failed to take them down.
Except, if you choose âHarmful or spamâ, Facebook does acknowledge that your report is for a fake account:
Of course theyâre harmful. Harmful to us regular people who have to pay more and more money to reach our human supporters since the fakes command an increasing amount of fans on our pages, for instance. It isnât harmful for Facebookâs revenue or Zuckerbergâs wealth. So it really depends how you define harmful; one would imagine that a competent court would define it from a consumerâs point of view.
Their new group policy, where Facebook has also given up against the bot epidemic, letting fake accounts join public groups, is a disaster. As you can see, the majority of new members to one group I overseeâand where I usually get tips to new bot accountsâare fakes. They’ve used scripts to join. It’s a bit of a giveaway when there are brand-new accounts joining groups before they’ve even made friends. The legit names have been pixellated; the fakes I’ve left for you to see.
It’s not as bad as, say, giving up on the people who elected you to run the country and letting COVID-19 do whatever it wants, killing citizens in the process. But it comes from the same dark place of putting people second and lining your pockets firstâMark Zuckerberg does it, Robert Mugabe did it, etc. Distract and plunder.
In The Guardian:
Boris Johnson will revoke hundreds of Covid regulations and make England the most unrestricted society in Europe from 19 July despite saying new cases could soar to 50,000 a day before masks and social distancing are ditched.
In fact, one Tweeter jokingly showed his interpretation of the UK’s COVID alert levels:
On this, let our own Prof Michael Baker have the last word. Also in The Guardian, which I shared three days ago on Mastodon:
Baker said public health professionals were âdisturbedâ by the UKâs return to allowing Covid to circulate unchecked, and that the phrase âliving with itâ was a âmeaningless sloganâ that failed to communicate the consequences of millions of infections, or the alternative options for managing the virus.
âWe often absorb a lot of our rhetoric from Europe and North America, which have really managed the pandemic very badly,â he said. âI donât think we should necessarily follow or accept Boris Johnson and co saying: âOh, we have to learn to live with virus.â
âWe always have to be a bit sceptical about learning lessons from countries that have failed very badly.â
We really need to be confident of our own position on this. There are too many, especially those propelled by foreign forces with their friends in the foreign-owned media, advocating that we follow other Anglophone countriesâprobably because they lack either intelligence, imagination, pride, or empathy. I’ve spent a good part of my career saying, ‘Why should we follow when we can lead?’