Real Ardern, fake advert
Even PM gets dragged into online scams
Jacinda Ardern’s photograph appears in a lot of places — including a recent promoted Facebook post that looked like a news story and pointed readers to a “new investment plan for Kiwis”.
If they clicked through, users were forwarded to a faux news article claiming that New Zealand Treasury had invested $250 million in a bitcoin start-up and New Zealanders stood to make massive profits by doing the same.
Lending extra credibility to the website was a CNN logo and the byline and twitter handle of Seth Fiegerman, a respected US-based tech reporter.
The entire thing — from the initial Facebook post, to the fake news site, to Fiegerman’s byline — is an elaborate ruse leading users to a bitcoin spam site, promising outrageous returns from the highly speculative cryptocurrency market.
What’s most worrying is not the use of Ardern’s likeness or the name of a popular journalist, but rather the ease with which spammers are able to target Facebook users with highly relevant and potentially harmful information.
Not everyone across the nation would have seen that ad. I suspect the only reason it squeezed into my newsfeed is that I tend to keep an eye on bitcoin as part of my job. That search history was equated to an interest in the topic and used to target me.
It’s important to remember, says Netsafe chief executive Martin Cocker, that the ad targeting tools of Facebook and other social media platforms are open to both legitimate businesses and to spammers.
Pretty much anyone with a credit card could set up a fake business and start targeting users with creepily specific details.
Another recent personal example came in a series of Facebook ads for premium surfboards, at a tenth of their usual cost. Once again, the ads were perfectly attuned to my interests and the connected online retail store did a great impersonation of any number of legitimate online surf stores.
“The thing with online advertising is that there are so many great legitimate deals that it can be difficult to spot those that are fake,” says Cocker. “The rule of ‘if it’s too good to be true’ isn’t as easy to apply these days.”
Facebook does a reasonably good job of removing scam ads, getting rid of 837 million pieces of spam and disabling 583 million fake accounts from January to March this year.
But it’s a never-ending battle, which at best can look like an elaborate game of whack-a-mole. As soon as Facebook eliminates one offender, another pops up.
Over a weekend, I was offered variations on the initial surfboard ads via a number of online stores, differing only in name and almost inseparable in their aesthetics.
“The cost of putting up an online business is low,” says Cocker, explaining scammers can quickly create a new fake store to replace one that was previously banned.
It’s a problem that even the New Zealand Government is battling to contend with.
“When we are advised of, or discover, examples of fake news that fraudulently use images of the Prime Minister, we immediately inform Facebook, who are usually pretty good at taking them down,” the Prime Minister’s press secretary Julie Jacobson told the Herald.
“We did let them know about the latest ones, that you have flagged. However, we aren’t able to manually or digitally monitor the increasing volume of fake news that fraudulently uses images of the Prime Minister.”
All this is part of the reason why Facebook is investing heavily in artificial intelligence that can quickly flag and remove offending content.
Facebook has also increased its team of human content reviewers, but given the hundreds of millions of posts churned out on the channel, it’s questionable how effective these eyeballs will be in keeping track of all the information published daily.
Creepy tech
On the topic of highly personalised targeted ads, it’s also worth questioning whether it’s really in the best interests of legitimate brands to use these tools too often.
Recent research from Accenture found that 35 per cent of consumers find it creepy when served an ad on a social site for something they had searched for on a brand website.
The only categories of targeting viewed as creepier were receiving a text (41 per cent) or mobile notification (40 per cent) from a brand retailer when walking past a store.
A more effective engagement tactic, according to the research, was the example of a brand sending a personalised apology to a customer who had a poor experience in a store.
Minister needed?
When former Broadcasting and Digital Media Minister Clare Curran was removed from Cabinet, her portfolio was passed to Kris Faafoi.
This added to a workload that already included the challenging civil defence and commerce and consumer affairs portfolios, which poses the question of whether Faafoi has enough time to focus on broadcasting or the increasingly important digital media aspects of his duties.
Asked whether there were plans to announce a new minister to take over Curran’s previous portfolio, Jacobson kept her cards close to her chest, saying only that as a former journalist and experienced MP, Faafoi “is well-placed and enthusiastic about the broadcasting and digital media portfolio”.
No one is questioning Faafoi’s commitment or skill, but even the most talented among us can achieve only so much in a working day.
The rule of ‘if it’s too good to be true’ isn’t as easy to apply these days.
Martin Cocker, Netsafe