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Comment by jpalomaki | Hacker News Reader

It is not so easy to build a credible fake social media account, since normal accounts are years old.

I was under the assumption that at some point in the US, there were "fake personas" who didn't exist, but their proof of citizenships did (ssn, birth certs etc).

What I am trying to say, i guess, is someone will make money out of this, manufacturing fake twitter profiles with real looking history.

Now, the thing is, though, it's hard, because at some point your "followers" and "followings" have to be real people that interact with you ideally.

Twitter should offer an option to hide to the public, across its platform (including RT's and replies), all your "Fucking orange clown idiot!" tweets...

It can label the checkbox "Make America Great Again".

Or activate freedom mode.

... giving long time spammers a brand new market.

Seriously, those accounts are years old and have a history. They would become hot property.

Wow. Talk about unintended consequences.

You can even buy 'aged' Reddit accounts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxNvUWN3vYk

that's funny. i sold my slashdot account in college for decent money (for a college kid) because i had a < 100 uid.

Maybe, but in many cases social media accounts are of very little indication of the person behind it. Employers, journalists and private investigators have been snooping around Facebook and Twitter long before State actors did and a lot of people maintain minimum activity on social media (and let it be family friendly too) just to blend in. If they habour any nefarious tendencies you are not going to find it on their public persona anyway.

> and a lot of people maintain minimum activity on social media

I suspect that's a fraction of a percent. Are there any cites for higher numbers?

I believe on Facebook, 90% of my friends only post something when they thank their friends for birthday greetings. They mainly use it for Messenger, and rather use Snapchat with a much more limited subset of friends for sharing. Most either don't have more SoMe accounts, or they use Instagram like they do Facebook, to follow people.

I couldn't find statistics, perhaps mainly because googling "facebook post frequency" or similar gives you 1000 SoMe SEO tips&tricks pages.

In the case of Facebook I would expect governments to be more interested in your connections (and their connections) than in your posts. You could be as minimal in your output as you can possibly be; unless you ignore all friend requests, you will be surrounded by at least some people who do 'like' and 'follow' as if their lives depended on it, and the aggregate graph of data will make it trivial to gain a rough idea about who you are and what your place in society is.

Any data that isn't obviously fake can help build their profile of you. The idea is that they can build on that profile when you do become a person-of-interest.

"English"[1] use this relationship mapping for gangs (mostly London and Manchester) and sometimes child sexual exploitation networks. But they're also interested in the content - see for example the Blackberry messaging used to convict people after the London riots.

I tend to be on the not bothered end of the spectrum[2] and I'm a bit wortied by the direction it's going in England with more stuff gathered, from more people, with less rigorous oversight.

[1] there are many different forces in England

[2] mostly because I saw regulation getting better. There are problems with RIPA, but it stoppwd some abuses.

> governments to be more interested in your connections (and their connections) than in your posts

Aren't most people's friend lists on Facebook consisting of 80% "People I went to school / university / work with"? In which case government already knows? Once we gets to "connections pf connections", you're looking at a set of many thousand people with no real indication of how strong the connection is. E.g. some of my best IRL friends I haven't even added on Facebook, but I have several people as FB friends that I haven't spoken to in a literal decade.

> In which case government already knows?

How? A citizen's own government might conceivably know who you work with professionally via the tax agency, but a foreign government doesn't (not without specifically requesting such data on a case-by-case basis). For most people who use Facebook, their list of contacts will provide any big data analysing actor with a very nice outline of their life and interests, especially if you are the type of state actor that can coerce Facebook into cooperating.

Even if your own profile is clean and seemingly meaningless, mom will have you tagged as her son/daughter, and who you communicate with and when will quickly filter out the uninteresting friends.

How do you distinguish between people who don't use social media, and those hiding their accounts?

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