Hereâs a screenshot from the new members of one of my Facebook groupsâactually the only public one I still have. Since Facebook lets spammers join now, we have to block them manually. Their posts donât make it through to the group as we have safeguards there, too. But Iâm not going to let them inflate, falsely, the member count, which in turn will make it harder for posts to reach group members.
A lot of these botsâthey hunt for large groups and their scripts join themâseem to hide under the guise of role-playing for the Pinoy TV series Halik, and they all chat to each other in automated fashion. As Facebook is stupid enough not to recognize the bot activity, youâd think that at least they could see the script at play here, as these accounts are often new, and they set to work joining large groups and pages.
They donât recognize them, or, they do recognize them and allow the bot activity to carry on with their blessing. Each one of these blocked accounts was reported, and as usual they were found to be perfectly fine.
In this screenshot, there were five legitimate accounts. We used to keep the numbers well down because potential members had to answer basic questions, and even some legit people are too lazy to do that. Back then we would see one legit account joining after weeks or months. I think I preferred that, because it kept the spammers and bots away.
It certainly gives the impression that bots, based on this sample (and others like it since Facebookâs pro-bot policy change arrived with this group), are running at about 50 per cent of the total, which gels with recent research that Instagram is 46 per cent fake (that is, 46 per cent of all accounts are not legit). Nevertheless, I still see far more bots than humans overall: just get yourself into the fake Halik accounts of the Smiths and Montefalcos, and now theyâre branching out into other surnames like Montenegro and Buenavista. Thousands, untouched, the only consistent activity on the wasteland that is Facebook.
If someone who has never been authorized to have a role on a Facebook page can have full admin access to it, then it stands to reason that a legitimate owner of a Facebook page cannot do what she needs with it.
Thatâs exactly what happened to my friend Holly Jahangiri, who has a Facebook page and an Instagram profile, both of which are connected. She can read her private messages. She can log into both, and she is the admin of both. Facebook has her email address and cellphone number. But she couldnât schedule a post for either, and thatâs when Facebook sent her into a loopânot unlike the one that Google sent me on in 2009, although Googleâs forum person was way ruder.
Facebook kept asking Holly to review her connection and confirm she is admin of her own pageâinformation that they already had. Unless their databases are so shot to hell that even internally they cannot determine this.
She would love to click ‘Confirm’ but the button was greyed out, saying, ‘You must be an admin of the associated Page’s business in Business Manager to confirm the Instagram account.’ But she is the admin.
Even if she tried disconnecting her accounts and attempted to reconnect them, so she could review that connection that they asked for, no confirmation email ever arrived. And when she logged into both Facebook and Instagram, on desktop and mobile, the accounts were indeed linked and confirmed in their Account Center.
It seems a small ask to be able to schedule a post on a pageâmind you, Tumblr wouldnât let me for some time, as every time we got to the scheduled moment, it would alter the day and move it forward into the futureâbut Holly persisted and decided to send them a message through their Business Support Center. She was lucky: she actually got a response. I never have. Or maybe she was unlucky that they responded.
Their first piece of advice was to ask Holly to do what she had already done: disconnect and start over. She proved she did it with the screenshot they requested, and that it still didn’t work.
Then they asked:
⊠in order for us to assist you better, please provide us with the following:
1. A screen recording in which illustrates the steps up to the section where the issue is showing. Please ensure that it is of the entire screen, including the URL bar at the top of the screen. For screen recordings, we recommend to upload the video on Dropbox and email the link to us. Do ensure the URL link is set to public. As in case we may need to forward your concern to the relevant team, this file will be very useful.
2. Page URL/ID where you are connecting your Instagram Account to.
Even though Holly has the knowledge to do a screen recording, she felt this was getting ridiculous, and, like me, she wasnât prepared to upgrade her Dropbox just to host a video for Facebook. And she had already given them (2).
She explained things once again but that Facebook kept asking her confirm her Facebook page and Instagram connectionâand providing her no means with which to do it. And that the Account Center said the two were connected.
She did one more screenshot with URL showing. In it, Facebook is still asking her to âConfirm Your Facebook Page and Instagram Connectionâ but giving her no means to do it.
Facebook responded by saying they still needed a video. And Holly answered that it wasnât going to happen.
Then she received this:
Hello Holly,
Thank you for contacting Facebook Concierge Support. We greatly appreciate your patience while waiting for an update.
We understand that you are unable to provide the video recording of the actual steps you are taking to show the issue being experienced.
What we can see is that the [Hollyâs page, redacted] is added on a Business Manager account where you have no role. Please be informed that if a Page is connected on a Business Manager account, the Instagram account you are trying to link on that Page must also be owned by the same Business Manager account.
If you know who are the admins of the Business Manager account that owns the Page, please check with them if the Instagram account – [Hollyâs Instagram account, redacted], is also added on that Business Manager. Also ask them to grant you admin access on that Business Manager. Once that is done, you can try again linking the Page and Instagram account.
Feel free to get in touch with us if you need any further assistance and we will be very happy to assist you further.
Do not hesitate to find our best support via https://www.facebook.com/business/help for future inquiries. We look forward in making your journey with Facebook a better one.
Thank you for contacting Facebook Concierge Support. Have a nice day!
Kind regards,
Yoyo
I would be fuming by now, because Holly is the admin of both, and there was no evidence of hacking. No one else is there as the admin.
She wrote: âSo who BUT me would own that business manager account? If it belongs to someone else, how do I undo that and create my own? How do I straighten this out? If it’s something I did incorrectly, then clearly I’m asking you: HOW DO I FIX IT?â
In classic Big Tech support, it seems Yoyo never read her message. They wrote:
Hi Holly,
Thank you so much for your email.
I can perfectly understand that you are not aware on who is the Admin of the Business Manager. Therefore, what I can do for you is, I will submit and Admin appeal for you by you will need to provide me the with some information and documents as below :
1) A copy of a valid government-issued photo ID, such as a current driver’s license or a passport, of the individual signing the statement. See the different kinds of IDs we accept in the Help Center: https://www.facebook.com/help/159096464162185
2) A signed statement from a person with sufficient knowledge and authority over this matter that includes all of the following:
a) The Facebook email address or profile URL associated with the Facebook account that you wish to have added as the new admin
b) A description of requestor relationship to the Business (and authority to request access to the Business, as applicable);
c) An explanation of your request, and whether there has been a termination of the employment and/or business relationship with the named person(s)/Business, as applicable;
d) The past three invoices/billing statements on the ad account(s) that the Business owns AND the last 4 digits of the credit card(s) on the account(s); âą If the BM does not have any ad account, please declare such information in the statement
e) A declaration that the information you have provided is true and accurate (e.g. “I certify that the information provided is true and accurate”) – your statement must include similar language.
For any other issues, please feel free to initiate a chat support session at the following link:
https://www.facebook.com/business/help
For any feedback regarding our features within platform, please use the link:
https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/268228883256323
Thank you for contacting Facebook Concierge Support and have a good day ahead!
Regards,
Yoyo
If youâve made it this far, youâll know why Holly shouldnât need to provide any of the above. The first paragraph from Yoyo is completely wrong since Holly is aware of who the admin is, but Facebook seems to want to ignore that.
At this point she was prepared to delete the lotâsomething Iâm prepared to do, too, but havenât. Apparently gadgets like IFTTT are tied to my account and they run things on Lucireâs Facebook page, which, based on the decision of the majority, is still being used by the team.
She showed Yoyo another screenshot that confirmed she is the sole admin. And told them that she would not provide any additional documents.
Their response, inter alia (and by this time, Yoyo was calling Holly ‘Yoyo’):
When it comes to data protection and privacy, Facebook does not reveal any information, the documents mentioned are mandatory since you are not the Admin of the Business Manager in which the Page is connected. We are not advising you to close your account for the sake of your business; rather, we are attempting to assist you.
Please submit the mentioned documents as soon as they are ready so that we can assist you further.
I can hear you screaming, âBut she is the admin!â
Any sane, reasonable person could empathize with Hollyâs reply:
So, the point is, I AM admin of the business account that any of my own pages/account are connected with unless I somehow orphaned them THIS MORNING after my last email to you, and your request at this point is tantamount to phishing. I’m not playing – I will not be sending you additional ID; you have my email, phone number, address, etc. (I have sent my driver’s license to Facebook, in the past, and I now deeply regret it. I will not be doing it again; I do not believe you safeguarded it in the first place.)
âWe are not advising you to close your account for the sake of your business” – what a joke. My business has never benefited from Facebook in any way, shape, or form. I opened the Business account because Facebook led me to believe I had to have one in order to upgrade and maintain my pages. I HAD an ad account, which I deleted, this morning. Ads I ran in the past were basically sent to EXACTLY the opposite of my target demographics and never led to ONE SINGLE SALE, so that is useless to me.
As an individual, all purchases I have ever made from other “businesses” on Facebook or Instagram have been scams.
I report fake and imposter accounts and I am told that they do not violate community standards.
I have reported actual kiddy porn in the past, to be told that it did not violate community standards.
I can only conclude, at this point, that Facebook prefers bots and scammers and phishers of men, because – I guess – they don’t cause as many headaches and the numbers look GREAT to advertisers.
I am now stuck in some sort of hellspace between your business center and your creator studio and ready to delete my personal profile as well as my pages and groups because I cannot figure out how to disconnect them from your “business center” thing.
In fact, Holly would have added, given the chance (these are her words):
I have been told by Facebook to download and install their partners’ anti-malware products and run them, despite my having my own premium subscription to Norton; I refused to do so, and was punished by a suspension of indefinite length (ended up being a couple of pleasant weeks away from Facebook);
I have had my wrist slapped for posting factual COVID info and stats DIRECTLY from the CDC, articles I wrote on Medium.com, and most lately, a link to a Wikipedia article explaining the origins of the classic nursery rhyme, “Humpty-Dumpty”
In other words, I’m not alone with the endless frustration this site causes. Iâm still frustrated and I barely use it, because of all the basics it gets wrong, constantly. And normally I would never take a dig at someone’s name but ‘Yoyo’ describes what Holly went through.
Holly wound up deleting all her ad and business accounts and reverted back to a personal one. When I read the above, Iâd rather have the usual silence than what Facebook thinks passes for âsupportâ!
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.
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?’
When I was in NYC in the summer of 2001, I stood at a Lower Manhattan bakery trying to order a cream cheese bagel for a friend of mine. The proprietor was busy making something. After close to five minutesâ waiting the counter, I asked if I could be served. His response: âYou want to fight me?â My sense is that cream cheese bagels have upset Americans for decades. This is merely part of the trend.
Note: I am not sure if the words cream and cheese mean the same thing there.
Poking around the bowels of Facebook, I found this. Apparently I had invited some contacts to join Facebook. It’s probably time to delete them, since they were smart enough not to respond.
I’ve no desire to allow them to create shadow profiles, because of something I did in 2007â8 before I knew shadow profiles even existed. Luckily I do not have Messenger, though I believe I briefly downloaded it in 2012 before deleting it soon after. I must have been careful to not let it import any contacts.
I chanced upon a mention of off-Facebook activity on this page, and hereâs a good page explaining what it is. (That first link has a lot of advice on what you can do to improve your privacy if you have Facebook, much of which I’ve mentioned over the years. But it’s very handy to have it all in one place.)
Apparently, you can now edit your off-Facebook activityâof course itâs something they don’t advertise.
If you head to www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity youâll see all the organizations that have sent your online interactions with them to Facebook. In my case, there were 265 who had sent them activity since the beginning of 2020. Good news: you can delete everything in there (bearing in mind this could break things that you have plugged in via Facebook), and turn off future activity.
I am very glad to note that Lucire has never sent information to Facebook.
I was surprised to find that I could access my Facebook advertising preferences again, after the section stopped working in January 2019. What was there was still way off, in June 2021, but itâs nice to be able to edit (read delete) them again after two-and-a-half years. Things move slowly in Menlo Park when it comes to user privacy. Frankly, they shouldnât even be collecting preferences after youâve opted out of preference-targetingânot even Google is stupid enough to do that (possibly as they have other nefarious means).
I was chatting to one friend who is as principled as me when it comes to Facebook bots. She screen-grabbed one who tried to send her a friend request, and we got chatting about the thousands-strong bot nets Iâve encountered.
She noted there was some fan fiction connected to one of the surnames, and I was able to find the Filipino TV series Halik. So are these accounts, accused by me of being bots, simply role-playing ones?
The reason I even know about them is that they attempt to join a group I oversee, usually with bot software that incorrectly answered the questions we had put up to weed out the fake accounts. (As I noted recently, Facebook has got rid of these, allowing bots to come in to every public group.) Why do they do this? They come in, hoping to hide among groups (and they also become page fans), to make themselves look legitimate. What happens instead is that we report them, and watch as Facebook does nothing about them, telling us that these automated scripts are allowed, and never mind the damage they do to pages wanting to reach their members. Youâll just have to pay more and more and more to boost the posts to reach the people you once reached for free.
Secondly, itâs concerning that accounts marked as newly started ones on Facebook already have hundreds, if not thousands, of friends within days. These just arenât normal patterns. They also talk to each other like nonsensical bots, responding with the same emojis or words.
On both these counts, the fact the accounts have names from a Pinoy TV series has little bearing. Facebook doesnât care either way.
When I reported Facebook to the US authorities, I received a permanent ban for whistleblowing.
When Donald Trump incited a violent insurrection at Congress, he received a temporary two year ban that would let him back in time for the 2024 campaign.
This is all a PR exercise.
— Christopher Wylie 🏳️🌈 (@chrisinsilico) June 4, 2021
Based on everything that I’ve covered over the years, Facebook (a.k.a. Botville) has had more form saying one thing, then doing the opposite, than it does with following through on any statement, window-dressing or otherwise. It’s part of what has turned US democracy into an anocracy, and as long as it’s around, it’ll continue to do so.
Why are there antitrust or monopoly laws? Why is the usual interpretation of the Chicago School really, really bad for the United States? Umair Haqueâs latest post spells it out pretty well, in my opinion.
Just an idea: letâs not import any of their dangerous ideas into our society, or allow their ever-growing giants to get more of a foothold in our country (and not pay tax here either). Because we have a tendency to kiss their arses sometimes. Just ask Kim Dotcom. Things like their legal precedents are still persuasive here, and with how different their priorities are, we need to place even less weight on them. Letâs not forget the rules we play by here, and that means whomever enters this market has to play by the same.
Speaking of daft decisions on the other side of the Pacific by dishonest parties who have got too big due to what amounts to lawlessness, Facebook has removed the requirement for users to answer questions when they join a public group. These questions were our way of safeguarding the one public group I still look after there, and over 99 per cent of users (no exaggeration; if anything, an underestimate) who attempted to join were bots. I define bots as including any legitimate account running bot software, which I thought was against Facebookâs T&Cs, but not in practice. I still report a lot of them, though unlike 2014 I wonât do them all. I just canât report thousands that I might see on a single visit.
I can imagine why Facebook has done this. This way Facebook hides the number of bots from group moderators (as if we hadnât known of their problems for the good part of a decade), and protects the bots as they continue their activity across the platform. This will encourage even more bots, and as I identified in an earlier post, I see more bots than humans these days on there (and Iâm not even a regular user).
I knew they were liars and shysters so I imagine this is in keeping with that. Cover up just how badly compromised the platform is by bots.
I havenât seen much on this change in Facebook group policy, but as changes go, this has to be the most anti-human, pro-bot move they have made in 17 years. No one ever demanded more rights for bots, but here’s Facebook giving it to them.
