Facebook’s excuses for allowing disgusting behaviour are a joke | David Penberthy
It’s a joke for a mega-rich corporation to claim it is powerless to control the cesspit it created, writes David Penberthy.
Two recent incidents in my hometown give lie to the marketing myth peddled by Facebook that social media is making the world a more sociable place.
As the following cases attest, nothing could be further from the truth.
The first involved a funeral for a beloved soccer player at a popular amateur football club in our southern suburbs, where a mate of mine also used to play.
The second involved a home burglary where the victim happens to be a local TV journalist, whom I also know.
The fact that extraordinary cases such as these can happen within your own circle of friends, colleagues and acquaintances says volumes about how common they are in this supposedly “social” digital age.
The family of the soccer player had arranged to have his funeral lifestreamed on the Centennial Park Cemetery’s website so that mourners who were interstate or otherwise detained could still pay their respects.
This is where the scammers came in.
They used the man’s name, which out of respect I will not use here, to create a bunch of fake funeral pages on Facebook headed “Celebrate the life of (Name)”.
The scammers targeted mourners by rifling through the deceased’s list of online friends, methodically duping them with a fake link to the funeral livestream.
When people innocently clicked on the fake link, they were prompted to enter their credit card details to watch the funeral.
The entire thing was, of course, one big scam and it prompted the football club to post this warning on its own homepage:
“We understand there is a fake memorial that has taken our picture of (name) and is adding club members to its page – please ignore!”
In the second case, when the local TV journo had his house robbed, not only did the thieves post videos of themselves on social media up-ending his house, they even went to the trouble of tracking down the journo via his Instagram – owned by those sociable people at Facebook – and uploading the videos to goad him.
It’s hard to imagine more sinister and anti-social behaviour, as if to tell this man that they knew who he was and to think twice about pursuing them.
When I talked about the funeral scam on the radio, I received a text from the owner of one of our biggest real estate firms saying he wasn’t the least bit surprised to hear it.
He explained that in real estate right now, with demand for rents at a record high and housing stock so low, Facebook is being used by scammers to con people desperate to find a place to live.
The scammers lift photos of real homes available for rent off reputable real estate websites and create fake rental pages, where they arrange to meet prospective renters at the property to show them through and take a deposit to secure the lease.
When the meeting occurs, the scammer apologises and says they forgot to bring the keys, but that if the prospective tenant could just pay the deposit anyway, they’ll secure the property, and that they will meet them back there the next day to give them the tour. No prizes for guessing how this story ends.
At least all of these stories involve nothing more than financial loss. What about the horrible and heartbreaking story this week of the young man in NSW who took his life after falling victim to a sextortion scam over Instagram, where the African-based perpetrators were threatening to release explicit photos of him they had obtained after tricking him into believing he was chatting privately to a flirty young woman.
This is the most common of all sextortion scams and has claimed hundreds of men, often costing them hundreds of dollars in blackmail payments, none of which will ever stop the scammers from proceeding with their threats anyway.
The great cop-out of Facebook and Instagram on this stuff is to argue that they’re not responsible for the worst of human behaviour.
It’s a joke.
They have built systems which enable all of this shocking conduct to occur. And they have made enough money in the process – genuinely vast amounts of money – to be prevented from arguing that they’re unable to do more.
My touchstone for all this is a funny and forgotten website I created with three other colleagues a bit over a decade ago.
It was a little opinion website called thepunch.com.au and it had something of a cult following, cult enough for this company to decide that our efforts could be best spent elsewhere in a commercial sense.
But however niche it was, it attracted a solid audience of like-minded lunatics who loved arguing about politics and current affairs.
And it was the readers who were the star of the show.
The posts we wrote ourselves were often three sentences long, concluding with an “over to you folks”, where hundreds of comments would come flooding in.
The one rule our very modestly staffed team of four had?
Everything had to be moderated. One of us would always be on deck to manage the comments, as we never believed we could get away with arguing that this part of publishing wasn’t our responsibility.
It’s a different ethos in the world of Meta.
Perhaps they’re too blinded by the profit they’re making to worry about things like their role in enabling school bullying, the creation of trophy videos by vandals and thieves, the dissemination of terrorist propaganda or the parasitic targeting of mourners trying to watch funerals or people desperate to find a place to live.
Someone needs to tell these people that they’re publishers.
If our gang of four can staff things properly to avoid a tiny opinion-driven website turning into a cesspool, you’d think Mark Zuckerberg, with his many, many, millions, might come out from under his hoodie and have a go.
Originally published as Facebook’s excuses for allowing disgusting behaviour are a joke | David Penberthy
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