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Comment by funtober | Hacker News Reader

Some scammers on Facebook have seized on to my aunt's name and image as the front for their operations. As family, they friend us from fake accounts on at least a weekly basis. Despite reporting these fake accounts more than 100 times, I got a new one today. They ask me for feedback every time I report an account. They are not getting positive reviews. Based on this experience, I'm not optimistic in their abilities.

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I should start photoshopping a fake scar onto my face in profile pics, so that I have a chance to be believed when I cry "Doppleganger!" with no scar on my real face.

I think a small lighting bolt on the forehead would look dashing.

I've heard reports that a non-trivial percentage of their accounts are fake. I share your lack of optimism, though I also wonder how hard they've really tried until now.

Why should we believe they're trying now?

There are persistent rumors that Zuckerberg wants to get into national politics. The spin will ramp up to neutron-star velocities when that happens. It's probably safe to stop believing anything they say, starting right about now.

Haha I started at least five years ago, the fourteenth time I heard someone complaining about automatically-changed FB privacy settings. Fool me thirteen times... Thus I wasn't surprised by #JeSuisCharlie or the recent wall-building kerfuffle.

He is literally doing a whistlestop tour around America right now, replete with bizarrely folksy essays laced with nakedly political rhetoric. Not so much a rumor as an impression he appears to be intentionally cultivating

Well, Trump has shown that the populace is accepting of businessmen as leaders. I'm sure if the rumors are true Zuckerberg won't be the last to think they can parlay success and fame into political power, and he wasn't the first (Reagon comes to mind).

Reagan was an actor, not a businessman. He did shill though.

Zuckerberg is waking up to how easily manipulable the portion of Americans who voted for Trump are. It's too easy. Just look at the republican response to sb18 in CA. The counseling association was suppossed to be working on an initiative to help but I'm starting to worry.

I believe it's fair to say that both sides are easily manipulated...not just those on the right.

I used to believe the same thing until the aftermath of this election. It's not even remotely in the same ballpark. It's like the Dunning-Krueger effect except there's two more peaks in the 0-20% range, and a lot of people with an island of intelligence in their career path outside that range.

it's actually very much in the same ball-park. The sheer fact that many liberals believe that a sizeable portion of Trump's supporters are fascists, or that he himself is a fascist, is proof of this. In fact, in my experience right-leaning people tend to be more skeptical than left-leaning people - too skeptical in some cases, leading to things like conspiracy theory and climate change denial.

Living around a great number of conservatives, but interacting with a great number of liberals online, my experience is that it simply goes both ways. It's a much-remarked-on idea that "red" and "blue" America are increasingly more divided. If you see people being skeptical today, it is rarely based on the content of the idea but rather on the political implications of it. Right-leaning people are suspicious of things that left-leaning politicians say or promote, and vice versa. I don't think either party, as a whole, is more skeptical or, conversely, more incredulous. Ideas have become more political, and to the extent that one idea is more or less accepted at face value it is probably because that idea has already been normalized by the mass culture.

I know far more people who believe Trump represented military aggression and big business while Hillary'just wanted to help people;' which is a very strange idea given that Wall Street, the Military Industrial Complex, and Saudi Arabia donated more money to her than any of them donated to anyone in history.

Meanwhile Obama prosecuted more whistle blowers than any candidate in history after campaigning to protect them. Then dropped 26,000 bombs on Muslims last year.

What about the evidence that came out that the Iraq War's WMDs were a fsbrication of the Bush admin's? Who has gone to jail over that? I personally know Americans murdered in this fabricated war for profit and oil. Even insiders like Greenspan wrote about how that Iraq War was for profit and oil.

The people who are represented are not the working class, productive and honest citizens. You are all too tied up in the Dems vs Repubs debate and other politics to notice this though.

Oh no I'm actually completely with you on that one. I think Bush and Obama were two sides of the same coin, although I don't think anyone knew that in 2008.

So..

You're saying your own personal denial of this election's results led you to double down on accepting your own personal biases as fact and justify your resulting increased conformity in believing 'what should have happened' onto others whose non-conformity bothered you?

Not a Trumper, but the 'boo hoo' media pity-party in the aftermath of this election has been oh-so delicious to watch after seeing through the level of spin in the last couple of years...

"But we told them to vote for Hillary, and they didn't! What went wrong??? Must be 'facism' and 'russian fake news'! Anything but people actually disagreeing with the moral/philosophical/political position I have absorbed without thinking from MSNBC-Universal-Vivendi funded Saturday Night Live skits!"

But yes, absolutely, the 'conformity' is entirely on the 'right'..

No, that's not even remotely close to what I'm saying or believe, you've constructed a strawman.

But your comment is shockingly similar to what I've heard from people who still support Trump irl. Do you personally ever talk about what's actually happening in washington, or just stick to this he-said she-said crap?

Yo dawg, I heard you like strawmen...

There's some truth in this (I assume), but there is quite a bit of evidence that those on the right value conformity with a leader's views more than those on the left. The infamous poll results on the Syrian strike[1] show this behavior. I'm not sure this counts as manipulation exactly, but sometimes the effect is the same.

[1] https://cmgajcjaybookman.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/syriapo...

There's some truth in this (I assume), but there is quite a bit of evidence that those on the right value conformity with a leader's views more than those on the left

It's tough to justify this generalization in a world where leftist leaders like Stalin, Castro, Mao, and Chavez are still warm in their graves.

It's fairly well-documented that viewers of right-wing news channels like Fox are extremely poorly informed compared to viewers of other channels.

This isn't up for debate. The numbers are both objective and unequivocal.

What's a successful actor if not a very specific type of businessman? (but yes, I meant to include a caveat there acknowledging that and forgot).

HMM...i thought it was against the HN rules to be politically partisan...apparently not, as long as you take the "correct" side...

Trump is about American nationalism, and he resonated with the poorer parts of the country by talking about making America great again. He's also "old school". Zuckerberg is in most ways the opposite.

> It's probably safe to stop believing anything they say, starting right about now.

It was safe to stop believing anything they say after facebook got caught neck deep in wrongdoings and apologized for the first time. IIRC this was circa early 2004 or late 2003 and it's been downhill from there.

Facebook was founded in February 2004, so they probably didn't do much bad stuff in 2003.

There are persistent rumors that Zuckerberg wants to get into national politics.

First,let me say that I respect Zuckerberg and what he's accomplished. But...

Does middle America care what "the Facebook guy" thinks? This seems like more SV delusion. The guy is literally running Big Brother.

I've got a similar problem with my own face. Scammers take public information from bar associations (I'm a lawyer) and build fake profiles using photos from firm websites. As I don't have any facebook account myself, finding and reporting these is a real difficulty. Most large law firms have someone dedicated to protecting the firm's name on social media but small firms just don't have the time.

FYI, don't believe anything said by a "lawyer" on facebook. We don't ever start communications that way. Visit the local bar association's website and check the lawyer's real contact info before saying anything.

> Most large law firms have someone dedicated to protecting the firm's name on social media

Which, in cases of fraud or scams, is a fine effort - in the cases of SLAPPs, not so much.

Law firms arent coke or pepsi. They generally dont care about public opinion. Only client opinion matters. What they dont want to see is thier name being used for criminal activity. But being seen as dark and scary isnt always a bad thing (see Wolfram & Heart).

It sounds like they're using your name, not just your face. Or are they just creating plausible fake lawyers? And what's the game? I can imagine that they're soliciting "customers", who they'll go on to dupe and rip off.

I do like your profile, by the way. It sounds like the lawyer-expert dynamic to me.

They send threatening messages to people that include links and data from firm/bar websites to make it seem as if it comes from a real lawyer. In extreme cases they setup entirely fake websites with data harvested from legit law firms.

No lawyer will send a threat via facebook. And no lawyer will ever demand a payment via bitcoin or gift cards.

I am still too naive :(

So they scam people into "settling" fake litigation. Over Facebook. And many people, who of course don't have much of a clue, fall for it. Amazing. But some of them, frightened and angry, contact your firm.

In some other world, where GnuPG had become widely used, legal communications would be signed, and people could just check signatures. That wouldn't help for fake websites, however.

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