Facebook: a haven for identity fraud
She looks gorgeous in her online photos; she has 132,000 Twitter followers; and she has been dubbed the most influential critic of Western involvement in Syria. Yet I’d hesitate to ask the Lebanese activist Sarah Abdallah on a date, said Hugo Rifkind in The Times. Why? Because there’s no proof that she actually exists. No one has interviewed her. No one else appears in her photos. For all I know, she’s a “basementdwelling male expert in social media manipulation”. Online identity fraud is becoming a major problem, as the money-saving expert Martin Lewis drew to our attention this week. He’s suing Facebook for hosting fake adverts that use his face and name to promote dodgy financial products. Facebook insists it isn’t responsible for them because it is a platform not a publisher. It’s up to Lewis, it says, to report the scams as they occur. But this won’t wash. In an age of sophisticated fakery, we need protection. If the tech giants won’t provide it, someone must force them to.
And that someone is the state, said Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. Facebook and other platforms may claim they’re doing their best to weed out fraud, but they have no real incentive to do so: they’re happy with a “Wild West” business model that keeps costs low and profits high. But like any new industry – like the railroads, like big pharma – social media brings health hazards in its wake that cry out for state regulation. While new industries always protest that it will kill them, it ends up giving them “a more fixed, responsible relationship” with the rest of society.
Facebook has got away with “pretty questionable behaviour” over the years, said Ellie Mae O’hagan in The Guardian, largely because many of us couldn’t really imagine how we’d be affected by its unscrupulous policies. Lewis’s story has made it easier for us to visualise the potential harm. It wouldn’t have been that hard for Facebook to find and remove the fake ads Lewis complained about, said The Guardian. Its facial recognition technology can, after all, identify and label people in photos. But until now, driving away advertisers had been its only real fear. Lewis has given it something else to think about.