Fake identities and the social media 

By Salihu Hussaini

In the world of social media, bogus social media accounts abound. Anyone can create or even buy a fake account and use it for a variety of reasons – to make themselves appear more popular than they are, to send spam, or for other more malicious reasons. There are also many grey areas in the social media world, which can cause business owners to be concerned.
The advantages of engaging through social media are well documented. Companies can enjoy a closer relationship with their customers and clients, as recently demonstrated by O2 which offered a great example of how a negative situation (a network outage) could be softened by effective social media management.

Social media sites also offer global reach, provide a platform to share content, and their reach and impact is easily measurable. Even better, all of this is free, as the infrastructure is managed by the social media network itself.
Businesses and brands everywhere are engaging with social media, but little is documented about the risk to brands of not knowing who they’re engaging with. With so many fraudulent accounts, and no fundamental way of proving the identity of people online, what’s to stop someone hitting the company hard in terms of reputation?
When people are anonymous, they can effectively say things with no repercussions.

Just look at the damages of online bullying and trolling. In the same way a company’s name can be slandered, false and libelous allegations can be made with the sense of security that anonymity brings. People can wrongly think they’re above the law, which is of course bad news for companies whose reputation is on the line.
The issue is particularly pertinent in light of Samsung’s admission this week that it had been posting anonymous comments praising its own products and slamming rival HTC on Taiwanese gadget sites.

The electronics brand was rumbled when TaiwanSamsungLeaksrevealed that Samsung’s marketing had paid students to post claims on forums, including “The HTC One X repeatedly crashes,” “The Galaxy S3 benchmarks better than the HTC One X,” and “The Galaxy Note is way better than the HTC Sensation XL.”
These dangers tie into the greater issue of whether and to what extent the Internet should be anonymous. The implications of knowing who’s who on the Internet go far wider than social media, and there has recently been talk about introducing regulation in online advertising.

This would mean that products that should only be available to those over age eighteen, such as alcohol, online gambling, or mature-rated games, could only be marketed at their target audience. But how could this be enforced without effective identity verification?
Without any form of regulation, it’s not difficult for minors to be enticed by such unsuitable products, and not much harder to actually access and purchase them. To enable this proposed change, companies would need to be able to prove that the people they’re marketing to online be of a suitable age.

Regulation and the idea of removing user anonymity bring about their own problems, too. There’s the understandable fear of misuse or loss of user information; the fear of it being used for fraudulent purposes; and in countries where expressing certain political views has serious implications, the fear of being readily identifiable is justified.
Another problem to consider is the threat of identity theft. Having all your “real” details on your Facebook profile would make you an easy target.

Hussssini is a student of Mass Communication and wrote from Minna

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