DUTERTE CRITICS’ FB ACCOUNTS CLONED
Thousands of accounts target students, professors and journalists
THOUSANDS of Filipinos discovered over the last weekend that their Facebook accounts had been cloned and some even received messages with death threats.
It appears that many of the accounts targeted belonged to critics of President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration.
Some students and journalists, who have voiced opposition to a controversial new anti-terrorism bill, were also among the victims. According to the South China
Morning Post, the University of the Philippines was the first to issue an alert against the dummy accounts, asking its students, officials and alumni to check their accounts and file reports with Facebook.
“Following protests (against the new anti-terrorism bill) on our campuses and threats to our students, there are now multiple reports of empty, duplicate and fake accounts bearing the names of students,” the university said.
“We express our utmost alarm since these accounts are suspected to cause harm or spread false information.”
Other universities, journalists and Facebook users soon reported having multiple accounts using their names. Most of the suspicious accounts were empty and had no profile photos, but some used photos of the original users.
Facebook said it was investigating and urged people to report inauthentic accounts, while Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra has said that his department’s cybercrime office will coordinate with the National Bureau of Investigation and the police to investigate.
However, the bureau has appeared to play down the matter, claiming that “in all probability” the cloned accounts were caused by a “glitch” because “it’s so difficult to create an account on Facebook”.
However, few are convinced by the bureau’s explanation.
National privacy commissioner Raymund Liboro said the large number of reported impostor accounts was “not ordinary”, while former solicitor general Florin Hilbay said there was a clear pattern to the attacks.
“Thousands of Facebook accounts have suddenly been created, targeting students, professors, journalists, critics. The objectives are obvious: to harass, create fear, and sow terror.”
Analysts said the cloning was no accident with one IT expert saying the sheer scale of it seemed to indicate that it was organised and coordinated.
Particularly sinister was that some of the cloned accounts shared personal information about the victim, such as their birthday or sexual orientation.
The expert said that in a discussion on Reddit one commenter had offered 3,000 Philippine pesos a day to anyone who would help duplicate Facebook accounts.
At the same time, he said there appeared “to be some amount of automation”.
In one case, when a victim changed his name, all the duplicate accounts promptly changed their names as well.
“I think this operation is meant to silence critics, cow them into fear and create a spiral of silence,” the expert said.
Some analysts saw parallels to the 2016 election when the data firm Cambridge Analytica boasted of helping to get Duterte elected.
University of Massachusetts Associate Professor of Communication Jonathan Corpus Ong, who has written extensively about Philippine fake news, said the duplicates could have been created using information from a “data breach”.
He said that based on a study he co-authored, “hackers and data analytics firms have the capacity to execute this”.
“It’s sophisticated tech with an unsophisticated outcome,” he said, noting that the fake accounts could easily be spotted and reported. This suggested there was a “new player” demonstrating its abilities, he said.
Despite Facebook’s vow to investigate, Ong criticised the social media giant.
“While some of the employees are well meaning, others downplay this, and say ‘we’ve seen this before, just report it’.”
“That is exactly the attitude that got us to data breaches like Cambridge Analytica.”