8 ms·
Of course the bad guys are going to have fake social media accounts, so I don't see what benefit could accrue from such a policy.
by intrasight 10y ago
Of course the bad guys are going to have fake social media accounts, so I don't see what benefit could accrue from such a policy.
- DanBC 10y agoNo, that's not the problem. We know that many bad guys don't bother hiding what they're saying or reading. The problem is that border security is going to over interpret normal text written by normal innocent people.
- zeroer 10y agoYea, that's a problem of false-positives inherent to any issue where the prevalence in the population is microscopic. If terrorists are 1-in-ten million, and the probability that you say something that has any interpretation that could be construed as terroristic is anything greater than that, then the overwhelming majority of hits are false-positives.
- isomorphic 10y agoThe benefit is to normalize unreasonableness. And to add another scene of "doing something" to the never-ending production of Security Theater.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jpalomaki 10y agoIt is not so easy to build a credible fake social media account, since normal accounts are years old.
- Laforet 10y agoMaybe, but in many cases social media accounts are of very little indication of the person behind it. Employers, journalists and private investigators have been snooping around Facebook and Twitter long before State actors did and a lot of people maintain minimum activity on social media (and let it be family friendly too) just to blend in. If they habour any nefarious tendencies you are not going to find it on their public persona anyway.
- DanBC 10y ago> and a lot of people maintain minimum activity on social media I suspect that's a fraction of a percent. Are there any cites for higher numbers?
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoI believe on Facebook, 90% of my friends only post something when they thank their friends for birthday greetings. They mainly use it for Messenger, and rather use Snapchat with a much more limited subset of friends for sharing. Most either don't have more SoMe accounts, or they use Instagram like they do Facebook, to follow people. I couldn't find statistics, perhaps mainly because googling "facebook post frequency" or similar gives you 1000 SoMe SEO tips&tricks pages.
- Freak_NL 10y agoIn the case of Facebook I would expect governments to be more interested in your connections (and their connections) than in your posts. You could be as minimal in your output as you can possibly be; unless you ignore all friend requests, you will be surrounded by at least some people who do 'like' and 'follow' as if their lives depended on it, and the aggregate graph of data will make it trivial to gain a rough idea about who you are and what your place in society is. Any data that isn't obviously fake can help build their profile of you. The idea is that they can build on that profile when you do become a person-of-interest.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago> governments to be more interested in your connections (and their connections) than in your posts Aren't most people's friend lists on Facebook consisting of 80% "People I went to school / university / work with"? In which case government already knows? Once we gets to "connections pf connections", you're looking at a set of many thousand people with no real indication of how strong the connection is. E.g. some of my best IRL friends I haven't even added on Facebook, but I have several people as FB friends that I haven't spoken to in a literal decade.
- drvdevd 10y ago... giving long time spammers a brand new market.
- verelo 10y agoSeriously, those accounts are years old and have a history. They would become hot property.
- intrasight 10y agoWow. Talk about unintended consequences.
- tehlike 10y agoI was under the assumption that at some point in the US, there were "fake personas" who didn't exist, but their proof of citizenships did (ssn, birth certs etc). What I am trying to say, i guess, is someone will make money out of this, manufacturing fake twitter profiles with real looking history. Now, the thing is, though, it's hard, because at some point your "followers" and "followings" have to be real people that interact with you ideally.
- patrickk 10y agoYou can even buy 'aged' Reddit accounts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxNvUWN3vYk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxNvUWN3vYk
- beachstartup 10y agothat's funny. i sold my slashdot account in college for decent money (for a college kid) because i had a < 100 uid.
- kazagistar 10y agoHow do you distinguish between people who don't use social media, and those hiding their accounts?
- grecy 10y agoDepends how you define "bad". This isn't about guys with bombs causing real harm. This is about people with different political views than the current establishment doesn't want spreading their message.
- PJDK 10y agoWhat sort of political views do you think would cause an issue?
- UnoriginalGuy 10y agoSocialism for one. Anti-Capitalism for another.
- simonh 10y agoAnything even mildly critical or questioning about the current Thai monarch in any way whatsoever.
- __s 10y agoHaving more than the federally allocated amount of disagreement with Israel on various controversies
- zo1 10y agoI'm a Libertarian/Anarcho-capitalist. I doubt that would sit well with a state-loving, proud-citizen, American-loving border control guard that has the power to deny me access to the country. Really, giving them such arbitrary power lets them abuse it for any reason they see fit. Whether it's valid or not is irrelevant as the power is there.
- kbart 10y agoThinking that all this push of mass surveillance is in order to find "bad" guys is naive.
- forgetsusername 10y agoIt certainly is to catch "bad" guys. The problem arises with the definition of bad , which tends toward anyone who disagrees with the views of the powerful.
- eternalban 10y agoIt's a form of soft social control to affect self-censorship.