Air Force Wants Hundreds of Fake Online Identities 124
bizwriter writes "Bad enough that spammers are creating fake Facebook accounts that acquire connections with unsuspecting people, then inundate them with crap. Now, the US military wants software and services to manage upwards of 500 fake online personas designed to interact with social media, presumably including such sites as Facebook and Twitter."
Facebook terms and conditions (Score:5, Informative)
Try reading the facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities [facebook.com], By using or accessing Facebook, you agree to this Statement., section 4.1: You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.
Presumably a law upholding (ahem) organisation like the US government and its agencies will want to abide with agreements that they enter in to ???
Why can they just lie and expect to get away with it. So does that imply that I can lie on my tax form and also expect to get away with it ? I am sorry: this is not acceptable. Governments seem to regard the law and good morals as something that others need to obey, not themselves. What about the individuals who manage these fake accounts, if I ordered an employee of mine to lie they would be liable to prosecution just as I would be; why should government employees be any different ?
Re:Not fake IDs, corporate IDs (Score:4, Informative)
The next gen would be very direct http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/15/sunstein [salon.com]
The old Office of Strategic Influence:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0219-01.htm [commondreams.org]
Re:What is the problem? (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly, it is. But who doesn't have a fake facebook account ?
Logic failure. Just because you have one account for social use and one for business, one of which you could call "fake", and you consider that "okay", doesn't suddenly mean that you have to accept that all fake Facebook accounts have to be "okay". Fake accounts for the purposes of astroturfing or propaganda are definitely not okay.
In my company's sales team most everybody has at least a "commercial" and a private account. That means our company "has" euhm ... a dozen facebook accounts perhaps, something like that. You could call it "astroturfing" probably, because it kinda is. Everybody does it.
Just because some of your peers do it doesn't necessarily make it okay. http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/07/15/1351204/Internet-Astroturfer-Fined-300000 [slashdot.org]