Recently Facebook was hit by a wave of spam in the form of image shares depicting porn , animal abuse and even photoshopped celebrities.The hacker group Anonymous was initially linked with this spam attack as they had previously made known their intention to hack into facebook. However , they are denying it , and as of now no link can be established that ties them to this spam attack.
That , however isn't why i decided to write about it. What irked me most was how many "concerned " netizens were actually passing some of these shares along in the name of "creating social awareness".
I'm not , of course , talking about the porn ( unless people suddenly need some extra impetus to watch porn ) .What I am talking about is all the morbidity . Images of tortured children, dead animals and other unmentionable horrors might just hit you smack in the face as soon as you log in. These graphic images , usually along with some text telling you exactly how the aforementioned dog was disemboweled , are supposed to make us jump up and take action , whatever that may be .Some of my suggestions are : join PETA , become a cape wearing vigilante who takes out racists , elitists ,chauvinists and of course dog-killers or may be even dare to do that which evokes terror in the very souls of the evil doers - sign petitions and mail them to government agencies ( who of course trash them without a second thought ) , and hold candle light vigils where you can hold hands and pretend to give a damn.
I'm not trying to ridicule the thousands who are actually involved in the above
movements , well okay , may be i am , just a little bit , but then this is my blog remember ,but why can't you keep it off my facebook ?
Why i think that these social awareness thingies are worthless and all a gimmick is a topic for another day , but why people should be forced to look at these horror pics first thing in the morning is beyond me . There must be better ways of spreading awareness.
Another example of how easy it is for spammers to create a mass movement on fake issues is the Facebook Gold account gimmick.
Many of my friends were convinced that facebook had enough of freeloaders and was going to start charging . Never mind the fact that facebook would make less money selling accounts than it makes selling the information of us freeloaders.
And then started the spam , as thousands ( may be more ) of users started sharing this status. Supposedly if they pasted the message on their status ,Facebook would gift them "gold" accounts , along with other goodies (like free brain transplants since they had clearly damaged the ones they were born with).Luckily the smarter breed of FB users came up with several witty responses to this madness , including one that claimed that posting a topless pic (women only ) would immediately get you a Gold account membership. These at least helped lift my spirit as i tried to wipe dog entrails off my memory.
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| a fake Gold membership page |
1 comments:
This is exactly what I had in mind,although on a more serious note. This works just as well though :)
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