CREEPY SOCIAL MEDIA

@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

A lot of it comes down to parental vigilance, just as in everyday life. However, random bot-generated friend recommendations not only don't help, they hurt, they interfere.

And a lot of parents we see don't know net or any other safety from a hole in the ground....hence their kids' great vulnerability.

Also, kids tend to listen to parents with whom they have a good relationship.....another x for vulnerable kids.

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@CalamityJane,

Some paedophiles have taken to the net like ducks to water.

I think it's just that all new technologies have swings and roundabouts I guess.

1 Reply

@dlowan,

Yes, you're right. I am glad to see though that facebook is listening and the
reported facebook sites are for the most part taken off.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

It seems to me, RG, that you're basically saying "It's too hard, they can't stop everyone, so why try?"

No, I didn't think that you wanted to eliminate the entire feature and outside of doing that I saw little that they could do about it. Now that it's clear you want to disable the feature for all I still disagree and perhaps even more so.

You say we should all just use the friend finder but that only works if you already have their contact info, and would ruin the use of the site to reconnect with people you don't know and I think that instead of that why don't you adults who are using kids' accounts to play games, and friending kids' accounts to play games just stop doing that?

If you didn't friend a bunch of kids they wouldn't be recommending those kids' friends to you, and how is Facebook supposed to know which kids are ok for you to friend (because it's really their parent using it) or not? If anything it sounds like the adults involved should just stop interacting with adults through the accounts of their kids.

2 Replies

@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

However, random bot-generated friend recommendations not only don't help, they hurt, they interfere.

It's not random, you said you friended a bunch of kids, these suggestions are friends that appear in multiple friends of yours (to oversimplify their algo) and this is why they think you know them.

Usually they are more accurate than in your case but when adults impersonate kids to play games that can make it less so. Maybe you guys should consider not making friends with kids accounts to play games and it will be less "random".

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@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

Setanta wrote:
However, random bot-generated friend recommendations not only don't help, they hurt, they interfere.

It's not random, you said you friended a bunch of kids, these suggestions are friends that appear in multiple friends of yours (to oversimplify their algo) and this is why they think you know them.

I believe the original post referred to one kid - she came in as a specific request by p.m., her mother has set up her account so she (the kid) can't be sent friend requests or messages, she has to initiate the request - not system generated.

Acceptance of that one request has created the flood of system-generated requests. Several of the new recommendations to 'friend' kids do not have any friend connections to Set's account.

Those are the ones I generally find odd - the seemingly random friend recommendations that FB makes.

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@ehBeth,

ehBeth wrote:

Those are the ones I generally find odd - the seemingly random friend recommendations that FB makes.

I've received several of those as well that show up to the right of my screen. I'm not entirely sure what drives those 'People You May Know' suggestions, but it's not always linked to friends I have made or people I have interacted with. I'd say a good 65 - 70% of them are people that have share no mutual friends with me. And seeing as how I'm not a fan of any clubs or liked any singers/actors/politicians . . . I'm not sure where they are coming from.

They definitely fall under the 'odd' category.

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@dlowan,

dlowan wrote:

Yeah, I know bad **** happens everywhere...but I think it's the scale that forms part of the problem.....the people who want to do bad stuff to other people have relatively easy access to a much bigger pool of possible victims without having to leave their homes for most of the grooming process, and with less reality checking possible by the people targeted. That is, I think that the Facebook/dating site effect is more than just the same amount of **** happening as happens with similar numbers in the rest of the world, but that some social media is making it a lot easier for the bad folk.

I don't think it's the scale of the internet that is the attraction but rather the anonymity and ability to communicate across jurisdictions etc. And there is no doubt that the internet has caused an increase in certain exploitation of minors through the ability to groom remotely as well as congregate online. But this has everything to do with being able to communicate anonymously (and more easily) and nothing to do with Facebook's policies being inadequate.

I am saying that no matter what they do (short of simply not letting humans communicate) this will happen and because it's a single brand at huge scale you guys call it rape book, but don't call email or chat rape chat or rape email and that difference is due to their scale as a single medium.

Quote:

But I do think it's very important for kids and parents to know this sort of stuff, and I guess I'd like to see Facebook making it clear that kids are liable to fet friending suggestions about random people to whom they have no actual social connection, if that's what's happening.

It's not. Setanta is interacting with adults who are using kids' accounts. That is why their friends are being suggested to him (when a large part of a social circle intersects it's more likely that you know them). If they's stop impersonating their kids this stops.

There's nothing random about it, adults are hijacking their kids identities to play games and interacting with other adults through the accounts of their kids.

1 Reply

@ehBeth,

I guess you guys call it random because the algo is a black box to you, but there's nothing random about it. Simply put, it recommends people that are friends with people who you are already friends with, the more of your friends they are friends with the more likely it is for you to know them. Sometimes you don't know them, but that doesn't make it random.

If you make friends with strangers to play games (or otherwise maintain an atypical social graph) the suggestions will be less useful but for most people they will be people they know almost as often as not.

I prefer to have some strangers recommended in order to connect with people I do know, and you can't be friends without mutually accepting it so I don't see much danger or problem with recommendations even if they were totally random.

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@Questioner,

Another signal they use is people who have searched for you. That is probably part of what you are experiencing.

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

The FB friend recommendations include some that are to people you have mutual friends with - but there is always a group that show no mutual friends/no mutual FB activities.

That is the group I am calling random.

I think we all understand the recommendations where there are mutual friends.

1 Reply

@Questioner,

Questioner wrote:

I'd say a good 65 - 70% of them are people that have share no mutual friends with me. And seeing as how I'm not a fan of any clubs or liked any singers/actors/politicians . . . I'm not sure where they are coming from.

They definitely fall under the 'odd' category.

exactly (well, maybe not the percentage, I haven't watched it that closely)

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@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

Another signal they use is people who have searched for you. That is probably part of what you are experiencing.

Apparently I have something that tween girls and 65 year old men find interesting. Going to try and not think about that for the rest of the evening.

1 Reply

@ehBeth,

It's not random just because you don't know what signal causes it and just because it's someone you don't know. But I get that it's random in effect to you and don't really care about what you want to call it unless you are advocating something like getting rid of the whole thing because of it. Is that something you favor?

1 Reply

@Questioner,

Social graphs can be funny, anyway I have no desire to defend the quality of their algo (or them even, I ******* hate Facebook) but my point is that they don't make random recommendations. If your point is that it's not a very useful set of suggestions, and even so much so that it appears completely aleatory then I hear ya.

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

I have a greater appreciation for why the kid's mom (from the original post) has controlled friend requests for her daughter's account based on what's been happening in our accounts over the past week or so.

I generally set my account so it can't be searched for - open it up only when I'm waiting for a friend request from someone specific - so it's annoying to get recommendations from FB that I'm not interested in. It is the 'cost' of using the FB services. It's something that everyone has to evaluate once in a while - is that cost worth it.

1 Reply

@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

If you aren't calling for laws then I don't think you are who I'm talking about. If someone wants to prevent their kid from getting on the internet till they are 18, or wants to make a site that doesn't allow kids I have no problem with that. What I object to is the law that requires all social sites to do this in a very stupid way (standard COPPA compliance is: ask them if they are under 13, and then if they say they are ask them to fax a document from their parents).

And I don't personally find recommending 10-year-old friends to a 60-year-old creepy, if anything I find the adults taking over their kids' accounts for FB games to be, but this is all influenced by this stupid COPPA law. If kids weren't forced to lie about their ages to sign up it'd be easier to deal with them more age-appropriately. But in this particular case, I think the entire problem stems from adults co-opting the identity of children to gain virtual goods in games.

When you say you are calling for responsibility on the part of the site owners what do you have in mind? Their policy is to disable profiles for anyone under 13 but how are they supposed to know that? It's easy for you to tell the picture is a kid but that is not easy to do with machines and many parents put their kids in their profile pics as well, further complicating this all.

I think this isn't the site's responsibility at all, and that it's up to the parents to parent their kids. That's why I hate the law, it asks site owners to try to block kids and it's hard to tell who's a kid over the internet.

Very well said; I agree 1OO%.

David

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@ehBeth,

I find the whole thing annoying, and the main reason I do is because of folks who play games that they let spam me and the rigidity of the social graph (e.g. required mutual follow) so I can't tell you if it's worth using it for you. I personally find the recommendations about the only reason to use it personally. I don't want to interact with people on facebook, but it happens to be the best place to reconnect with them so that kind of thing is valuable to me while I'd be happy to be rid of games (which sounds like something you wouldn't).

Different strokes and all and if your point is that you don't find it useful I certainly am not going to disagree with you, and if you just want to be rid of it for yourself that is easy enough to do (you can use userscripts to modify any webpage to your liking) but Setanta seems to think that it should be removed for everyone, even folks like me who want it, because of the kid recommendations and I don't agree with that.

2 Replies

I use Facebook, I'm not a heavy user, just socially.
I've got old friends scattered around the country and the site is a real boon to maintaining contacts.
I've never had any of those kiddie friend recommendations, but then I don't play the games.
I did once, play a game, I think it was called knights of camelot, it was all a lot of fun til I got my ass kicked really bad, haven't played since.

Anyway, parents really need to pay attention to their kids online activities. It's the parent's responsibility to educate themselves about any activity their children are involved in.
It is just not possible, or practical to expect the internet to do the policing for them.
If your kid is playing soccer, it behooves you to learn something about soccer. The same applies to internet activities.
IMO, parents using a childs account so they can play more of a game on the cheap is f&*kin reprehensible.

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@dlowan,

dlowan wrote:

Dunno......we are tending to call it rape book at work ( though the majority of my colleagues use it obsessively) because of the number of raped kids we are now seeing who met some guy on Facebook, got to "really get to know and like him and I knew he wasn't like the creeps my mum keeps warning me about" and were innocent enough to agree to meet him/them without their parents knowing.

Of course, it's the more vulnerable kids who tend to do this, just as those kids are often the target of sexual predators in the real world. But it and other social media do seem to be extending the range of options for people who like to sexually assault others.

Some of these kids appeared to be pretty well versed in net safety, but the rapists were skilled in seeming trustworthy, and what kid doesn't take risks?

I'd be damn watchful of a kid of mine using social media, and I find it disturbing that Facebook's friending process seems not very discriminating..

Most of what we've been seeing isn't old guys pretending to be younger though....it's sometimes same age boys, or men from about eighteen to thirty, so I'm not sure if Sets original point is especially risky or not.

The critical consideration, from the perspective of safety,
is not the issue of on-line conversation which avoids rendering personal information,
but rather it is NOT meeting anyone in the real world; (at least not without a bodyguard).
Explain to the kid that bad guys have histories of being convincing.
Explain to him that trusting people (at any age) is a risky business; too risky.
It shoud be kept to a minimum.

David

0 Replies

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