Another imposter profile

Our ConnectSafely forum gets reports of these all the time - posing as someone else, including fictional people, is not unique to any social site or technology - but this case is particularly ugly. "Eighteen-year-old high school student Anthony Stancl is accused of creating a Facebook profile belonging to a nonexistent teenage girl and then, between approximately the spring of 2007 and November of 2008, using it to convince more than 30 of his male classmates to send in nude photos or videos of themselves," CNET reports. He then proceeded to blackmail them, saying he's post their images online if they didn't have sex with him. At least seven of the boys did. Here are two early cases of imposter profiles that came to my attention, involving what I'd call "extreme cyberbullying."

Briton wins social-site libel case

This is a social-networking legal first. A British high court awarded a man named Mathew Firsht 22,000 pounds (nearly $44,000) in damages from a fake profile and group about him on Facebook, according to a report in MSNBC. The group, called “Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?”, and imposter profile reportedly were created by a former school friend. The profile contained "false claims about [Firsht's] sexuality, religion and political views, the Financial Times reports. According to MSNBC, "the information stayed on the site for 16 days until Firsht's brother spotted it. Firsht alerted Facebook staff who deleted the pages and told his lawyers they had been posted on the site from a computer at Raphael's home."

Imposter profiles: No easy solution

Imposter profiles are one form of cyberbullying or online harassment certainly not restricted to youth. Tweens, teens, and adults create profiles that impersonate the people they want to harass, putting them in an embarrassing or defaming light. There are also simply fake profiles of imaginary people aimed at tricking the real people who "befriend" the imaginary people in the fake profiles, which is what happened in the Megan Meier case (see "Extreme cyberbullying: US case comes to light." In a well-reported article, ConsumerAffairs.com describes a few actual imposter-profile cases and how hard it is to make them go away. Part of the problem is that, online, it's much easier to set up a profile than it is to prove its harmful intent or impact. Some people who click the "Report Abuse" buttons in sites are actually being abusive - of the site as well as their peers. "MySpace includes a link at the bottom of every profile to report abuse, but many people misuse this to harass someone who has posted a legitimate profile," ConsumerAffairs reports. The article includes no solutions to this growing problem because there simply are no known ones besides better, more civil behavior on everybody's part and education aimed at that and at the fact that we're not as anonymous online as we all think we are. ConsumerAffairs also goes into the law and how little it can do in these cases.

Stealing personality?!

First there were identity theft and cut 'n' plagiarism. Now there's cut 'n' paste personality theft, the Wall Street Journal reports. It's more sad than threatening. "These identity thieves don't want your money. They want your quirky sense of humor and your cool taste in music." The Journal says people are not just stealing others' jokes, but their favorites films, books, "life philosophies, even signature poems." It brings new meaning to the phrase, "Get a life." In a way, it's also a sign that social networking is demanding something pretty cool; to have an interesting profiled, it helps to be well-read, have some musical interests of a certain depth, have something to put out there for friends to see. But back to the downside: Stealing these things from others it's similar to the laziness of plagiarism and it's yet another indicator of the crying need for teaching ethics - not just cyberethics, certainly, because, at least to young people, this is about identity exploration, socializing, basically just life.

Imposter profiles: Ongoing problem?

We don't see that much about them in the news media, but we certainly do in ConnectSafely.org, and MySpace even has a dedicated email address for reporting them: imposterreport@myspace.com. CIO magazine says imposter profiles aren't going away anytime soon in "Fake Social Networking Profiles Still Big Problem, But Don't Expect Social Networking Sites to Care." Leading with the story the New York Times broke about the impersonating Facebook profile of assassinated Pakistan People's Party's leader Benazir Bhutto's son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, CIO reports that social sites tend to take a reactive approach to fixing this problem. Because social sites rely on advertising for revenue, it adds, they "don't want to make it hard for people to start pages." Until they do, it's smart to view social-networking profiles with a grain of salt. One way to check a profile's authenticity, CIO points out, is a free service called claimID. It "allows users to keep a 'link résumé' of all the sites they use and maintain. If a user found a friend's MySpace page, for instance, he could check the link with his friend's link résumé to ensure it's real."

Social Web's complexity: Illustration

The story on WhosaRat.com, though not about youth, clearly illustrates how complicated the user-driven Web is. The site - whose mission is to out “rats” (informants or what judges call “cooperators”) by publishing court records – is a lot like a social-networking site. It “offers biographical information about people whom users identify as witnesses or undercover agents. Users can post court documents, comments and pictures,” the Associated Press reports. How hard it must be to tell who’s telling the truth about who, whether an “outing” is purely out of revenge - if the person behind a profile is really exposing a snitch or just bullying someone who did nothing wrong. The site says it’s “a resource for criminal defendants and does not condone violence.” For a very balanced examination of the site, don’t miss “Whosarat.com: Two views of outing witnesses” at NetworkWorld.com. It says – rightly, I think, regardless of who set it up and why – that “what … should be done about such sites ought to be a tough call for anyone interested in balancing the interests of law enforcement, witness protection and free speech.”

Defaming site: 3 teens accused

The profile, which was online for four days in February, impersonated the father of a classmate of one of its alleged creators and “featured a confederate flag and racial slurs,” the Carlisle (Penn.) Sentinel reports. The town police chief Alan Houck said he wasn’t sure why the kids created the MySpace page but thought they might’ve decided to “smear the family name” because of a disagreement with the son. He said he “intends to file identity theft and harassment charges against the teens unless the juveniles come forward to talk to him. In that case, Houck said, he may consider filing lesser charges.”

Obama's MySpace: Lesson for teens?

What happened this week with Barack Obama’s MySpace profile could happen to anyone, and it’s a useful illustration for people trying to understand ways cyberbullying happens on the social Web. One way: A friend sets up a blog or profile for someone. The someone begins to feel that friend is misrepresenting her and suggests maybe she should take over her own profile. The profile creator takes offense because he feels he was so nice to set things up. He changes the password so the person the profile’s about can’t have access. Friends become ex-friends, and now the page is an imposter profile, where harassment and defamation can happen. It didn’t get that bad for Barack Obama, but his campaign let some nice volunteer supporter in L.A. create the candidate’s profile and run it for more than two years, the Associated Press reports. It was pretty convincingly Obama, you can see from this amusing Los Angeles Times commentary about how the writer was getting way too many bulletins from Barack and had to delete the candidate from his Friends list. Probably not because of the L.A. Times piece but wisely, Obama’s campaign people were beginning to feel it was time to take control of the profile and asked the L.A. supporter/profile creator to hand over the password. You can read in the AP piece how a sticky situation seems to have been resolved fairly amicably – thanks to a personal call to the guy from Obama himself - but with Obama having to give up the 160,000 friends the supporter amassed for his MySpace profile while it was under the supporter’s control. That 160,000 was “about four times what any other official campaign MySpace page has amassed.” But by Wednesday evening, the Obama profile’s Friends count was back up to 20,000. In a bigger social-Web fracas this week, user-driven news site Digg.com experienced a user rebellion that could mire the site in litigation that would have the potential to put it out of business – see CBSNews.com.