Former Diplomat Slams Facebook For Inaction On Fake Pages 164
An anonymous reader writes "Former diplomat to Belgium and the European Union Brendan Nelson describes his astonishment at his inability to get any response from Facebook when trying to get a diplomatically damaging fake page taken down. The social network ignored official protestations from the department of foreign affairs and security agencies."
Lame summery (Score:3, Informative)
The flame baiting, lame summery tries to make it looks like some evil diplomat tries to censor some facebook pages. But as the TFA says, this is about an imposter who has assumed a diplomats name on a fake facebook account and now post fake posts.
Former Politician (Score:4, Informative)
Brendan Nelson is primarily a politician, not a diplomat. The highlights of his career include supporting the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution and gutting the academic independence of Australia's University/Science Research System.
Re:Define "Fake Post" (Score:5, Informative)
If it is someone literally impersonating him that's a different story.
It is someone literally impersonating him.
Re:Define "Fake Post" (Score:5, Informative)
No difference for them. Facebook doesn't care because all they care about is serving ads. More pages=more ads.
I had a problem a couple months ago. I have a business and a business page on facebook with nearly 2500 fans. I worked years to get it to where it is now. One day, suddenly, a fake profile appears, using all of my images, texts, etc... all except the prices: he claimed everything was half of what i posted on my true page. It took "orders" (send your money and i'll send your order).
A couple of customers alerted me. So i asked all my facebook friends AND my customers to report the profile. It was still there for days, still active, friending more and more people. People even started coming into my shop asking and getting mad because "on facebook you told me half this price!" and i had to explain that it was a fake profile (mad people don't reason - they went away angry at ME!). Eventually I confronted the fake profile, told him everything i knew, and told him i had already contacted the police. Minutes later the profile was inactive.
It wasn't facebook who deactivated it. I had to do it. Facebook NEVER gave a shit. I'm a facebook CUSTOMER (because I PAY THEM REAL LIFE MONEY FOR ADVERTISING). And I didn't get a phone number, mail address or anything. Just a useless contact form directed straight to /dev/null.
Facebook has people checking "flagged" things - you will never see porn on fb because they kill that kind of content within minutes. But when it comes "edge cases" like mine, it's a big fuck from them.
Do i still work with them? Yes. I have no other choice. I spent months developing a website. One that worked and that I kept updated. For 10 visits a week vs facebook page's ~500 visitors/mo. 5x that if i pay for ads. Right now, as of 2013, facebook has become "the internet". It has already killed Windows Live Messenger (THE IM system for spanish-speaking people).
Facebook doesn't give a fuck about business pages either. They don't offer a "chat" option for pages (people actually want to chat. they don't want to "send a message", but the stupid antisocial asperger-syndrome driven facebook developer doesn't understand the power of "live chat with a real person"). They don't offer an option to "schedule" album posts. And to make things worse: they force you to pay now. Your reach will be minimal if people haven't added you to their "interest lists", and for 90% of your customers, your post won't appear unless you pay $5 to promote it for 3 days (which is an outrageous amount considering that, to keep your page "alive", you need to post at least once a day). I don't want to pay $150/mo to facebook - sorry.
Re:I agree with the man (Score:5, Informative)
I also think that there could be a better authentication system at FB.
We'll think about this while taking our fourth shower of wealth in our gold-plated bathtub. In the meantime, did you know you can promote a customer service inquiry by paying only an additional $3.99?
Seriously dude, you're the product, not the customer. Who cares what you think? You've already given us all your personal data, what does it matter?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)