This requires me to dance around a little bit and even with that I might, for legal reasons, get in over my head and be required to delete this series of posts. So bear in mind that this is still my opinion and not a statement of absolute fact. Bits and pieces will be presented as fact which I’m using the defense of a disclaimer summed up as follows next paragraph. This is specifically about Facebook and more specifically about their suggested friends algorithms. And it seems to me just as bad or even creepier than YouTube where you can get unintentionally lost or purposefully tricked into finding something you didn’t intend to. And how it can steamroll if you aren’t careful.
DISCLAIMER: What I present is information gathered from personal observation using my talents as an experimental criminal psychologist. I feel safe in being able to duplicate the results if need be as the experiment has been going on for months, and if challenged can defend my actions to appropriate authorities. In fact, I’ve akready taken steps to document my activities and this post is part of explaining what I’ve done, keeping out pieces that nobody but me and some close friends know, and the general public really doesn’t want to know.
On FB you get a batch of Suggested Friends occasionally, seems to be once a day. Extra batches if you send requests to new friends. Personally, I found it odd that on a regular basis I was getting obvious pornography links. When it works the way it’s supposed to, FB sifts through your profile data like where you and your friends actually live, workplace, pages liked, etc... to find matches. And somehow, somebody knows the way to get around it and use it for less than reputable reasons.
Supposedly even an account made that claims to be a European female with graphic images of genitalia, filthy language, links to a website proudly claiming their hot nude photos are available gets attached to a batch of reasonable friend suggestions. Like, all the freaking time. So I said to myself, “I wonder if I can trick the algorithm into suggesting not pornographers foreign friends.” And it’s REALLY easy. Just find one person you don’t know, send a request and immediately you get other suggested friends, some but not all from that area of the world. Not all, but some directly from their friends list. Then in turn you can pick suggested friends, request and repeat. Over and over.
Then it turns creepier. Not everyone that doesn’t know you has the good sense to ignore you. It seems that as soon as one random person accepts that you get identified as a trusted requester and it’s easier to get more accepted requests.
Now some of these people that accept your request are understandable, like people that have a page for their business of selling crafts or promoting their favorite charity where a person that doesn’t know them could reasonably have expected to find them. Some are friends of friends that might be thinking they know you when they actually don’t. That’s not too creepy since the way the Kevin Bacon game works with people knowing other people who know other people who know...and I’m sure FB can argue that this is the intent. I do not see how I get a suggested friend who is a Polish woman living in Krakow with less than 20 friends (all Polish) or a 14 year old Vietnamese girl makes any sense. It’s just begging for trouble.
Now here’s a fun duplicatable experiment. Go to the FB search feature, pick and common female first name and add Smith or Jones for the last name. Maybe even the top hit and almost certainly high up on the list is porn. These are in various degrees of how graphic the profile content is. Some are very obvious while others appear to be like a field in fallow or where you buy a domain name in advance to capitalize on it before “Bobsautopartsoutlet.com” gets around to creating their webpage and has to pay you to use the site name they wanted. Sometimes more than one porn link for the same name exists.
Now think about some of what I shared in combination. The minimum age for FB is 13, and finding porn is easy. I doubt the parents of all the 13 year olds think this is “Ok”. The suggested friends algorithm operates the same way advertisements absolutely do on FB. I searched the Internet for the LLS, immediately a legit FB ad for the Leukemia Society showed as the featured post next time I visited FB. Same for dog toys. Etc.... I also am not in the habit of searching out things like porn that show up, but there is a correlation.
Now turning back to the disclaimer, there has been a subset of friend requests I’ve made that I shouldn’t. Attractive ladies with tattoos and/or bodybuilders. They seem rightfully proud of themselves and often have way more friends than they can reasonably expect to keep up with, like 5000. The same way that some lady in Poland that doesn’t know me I had a week where FB pegged me as being interested in that “type” with loads of suggestions of people I didn’t know. Any friends I picked up were unfriended and fortunately many just ignored me, but I’ve hardly ever been questioned if I really know them. (4 times out of 100s of requests).
I don’t feel guilty giving people with bad intentions this info through this post because lots of people have already figured it out independently. It might even do some good for more people to be aware that the way FB works makes it too easy, because they (FB) really don’t seem to care. Because although they do a little to stop the sender of a request, as far as I can tell they do nothing to warn the receiver. Since it’s social media implying interaction between more than one person a warning “You shouldn’t accept friend requests from people you don’t know” is in order.
What they do to the sender is apparently this, too many requests in a certain time frame gets you a “Do you really know this person?” message. Keep at it and you get a more direct, “We don’t like it, knock it the fuck off” message. There should be a “We noticed you have 3,000 friends already, ate you sure??” sent to the receiver.
Part two will be about Herbalife as that was the main target of my experiment, and will include the tie in to gematria.
No comments:
Post a Comment