Social Media News

New-age social media is a diverse sub-culture of its own, a modernized shift in influence has devoured the human psyche; leading to both positive and negative results.  An outpouring of interest in globally impacted online socialization has came at shocking levels, leading research shows social media has became a much larger market than that of the entertainment of Internet pornography; claiming the top spot in search material for 2009. Surging social media memberships are freely available for those with a valid electronic mailing address who are willing to check a Terms of Service box; site policies that very few people actually come to read. Flocking towards independence; users are allowed to freely create, edit, censor, share, and at their will delete content while gaining friendships in the process. Sovereignty unites from sharing millions of pieces of user-generated content ranging from textual, audio, image, and video yet users cannot converge on complete accuracy of such content; nor can they be completely sure of the members on their list. As membership swells so does fraudulent users.

Research suggest that up to 30% of all social media members are of a misleading persona; the motive of such scam is that creating fake identities and falsifying information is simple, effective, and extremely easy to get away with. Fake individuals have been around since the very beginning of the Internet era, but attention must be brought to the increase brought by the social media revolution. Simplistically identified, the Internet gives people the possibility of using typing skills to express their internal feelings or create a life of corruption that they wish to lead; from the smallest little white lies deception can lead up to pathological mental illnesses — the modern day Internet fraudster has no need to use outstanding acting skills to pretend the desired character as would be needed in real life so mental illnesses are spotted less. Without the need to leave their home, some even diverging on sociopathic behaviors, appalling manipulation comes from their association to the outside — a service provider’s connection to the World Wide Web. While especially frequent and often dangerous on Internet dating sites, social media has become the new attraction to those seeking attention; attracted by a sizeable fawning audience. Growing is the need for protection and the realization of the too often accurate cliché, “if it’s too good to be true, it usually is”.

If a members profile or social networking footprint is lengthy, evidence reflects that the person reveled is probably not that of a scammer; Internet fraudsters usually do not have the time to create a lengthy path – however, if anything in the profile sounds suspicious a tip off can be made, for example changing stories and previous tipped off user comments. Google has become a welcomed and highly recommended tool in outing those of forged social media identity; given a name, electronic mailing address, and/or username Google allows users to search extensively though thousands of pages that may exist per persona — yielding an accurate search result, a location may prove to be valuable and often found on linked pages and/or public content — abundantly creative these folks often are not. Creating a ersatz personality usually is done for attention, from a social media perspective these men/women desire to be noticed and may flood/spam the site with intimate details of his/her life; often these details are extremely fabricated — sticking around long enough, frequently these fakes can be caught in their own self created lies as the cliché states “it’s a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive”. Questioning the suspect, is also a recommended socialization technique; many times questions will never be directly answered and blanetently ignored, other times conjured up stories that offer extreme questionability will be gave for an answer, suspects may often become outraged and accuse the questioning party of harassment, and/or lies can be uncovered as prior shadowy stories are confused.

Social media protection is key as one never wants to give personal information to a criminal like individual, if coming in content with such individuals it is recommended to warn others; while placing the user on block/ignore. Others may choose to publicly warn a mass group by providing creditable facts. It is recommended never to provoke one who lives to perjure themselves, as this only creates social media noise and may be in direct violation of the agreed Terms of Service; however always keep a watchful eye out on social media members that seem oddly out of place.

(Copyright © Social-Media-News 2009)