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I seem to remember doing some prank-ish thing like this in the early days of Facebook. Create an activity or whatever that you "liked" (ex: camping) and friend
by soylentcola 7y ago
I seem to remember doing some prank-ish thing like this in the early days of Facebook.
Create an activity or whatever that you "liked" (ex: camping) and friends would see that "soylentcola liked camping". They would also like camping and then eventually you would change the name of that tag/activity/whatever to something like getting kicked in the nuts so that now it tells people that "John Smith likes getting kicked in the nuts".
I honestly don't remember the specifics as it's been years since we got our laughs out of this for a few minutes (hell, for all I know this was on MySpace and not Facebook. Really don't remember).
- EGreg 7y agoRight! This can be done by changing the name of a page people like. Not just a post. Seems like you can get really good amount of likes for a popular thing (like calls for impeaching Trump in 2017) before changing it to some thing you want to promote (like Tom Steyer for President) ... and you can even qualify for the Debate stage!
- soylentcola 7y agoI haven't been on Facebook in a couple of years now, but I recall similar issues. People/groups would create pages for popular things (again, like "camping" or "sleeping in on the weekends") so that thousands and thousands of people would "like" that thing. Then once those pages had enough followers, they could be sold off to whatever marketing group wanted access to lots of user data and an outlet to post sponsored content to a lot of viewers. It wasn't just this bait-and-switch, though. Loads of "meme" pages and similar stuff built up a large enough following and then were either sold or just directly used for marketing. I think it was bigger when companies/individuals could use Facebook to drive clicks to their sites but I have no idea if that's still a thing these days. Last I saw, most users/posts tended to stay within the Facebook "umbrella" rather than being linked to outside sites.
- marvin 7y agoWe did this too, all the time. Never thinking about the implications. Then suddenly it's 10 years later, social media has become one of the dominant global communications channels and it turns out this vulnerability can be used not just for funny pranks, but also to get people thrown in jail or even killed. It's uncanny how young people have a razor-sharp nose for weaknesses in the fabric of society, often without even realizing it.
- hyperdimension 7y agoYeah, I remember liking the, uh, "it in the ass" page in the early days of Facebook.