by The social media space is absolutely ripe for a new entrant who demands arduous verification and constantly monitors its user base to eliminate cloned and fake accounts. How many accounts on Facebook are fake? Recent estimates of half could be low. Here’s an experiment: open a Facebook account with a name that cannot possibly be anyone else’s real name, for example, Johns XQR Citizenry. Solicit a few real people to friend you, start posting something original every day and see what happens. Eventually, your friends will inform you that “Johns XQR Citizenry” solicited them to friend him, even though they’re already friends with you. Congratulations, your Facebook identity has been cloned. When you do a search, you
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| This raises another question: how can any social media company verify a “real identity” from a fake identity? The only way to do so is to institute a process much like opening an online bank account, a process that requires identification, deposits into an existing account and so on.
How much is it worth to users to join a social media network that works diligently to weed out fake accounts? How different would their experience be if it was extremely difficult to set up a cloned or fake account instead of super-easy to do so? Many people conflate an addiction to screens with an addiction to Facebook. People are indeed addicted to their smartphones and related screens, but that doesn’t mean they’re addicted to Facebook. The social media space is absolutely ripe for a new entrant who demands arduous verification and constantly monitors its user base to eliminate cloned and fake accounts. The number of “real” accounts in such a network would be a fraction of the existing debauched networks, but then users could actually trust that network. Advertisers would finally be able to trust that their millions of dollars in spending isn’t going mostly to click-fraud farms. |
Smartphone Addiction Tightens Its Global Grip - Click to enlarge |
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