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Comment by revscat | Hacker News Reader

Hypothesis: If 0.1% of Facebook users were to publish their password to Twitter, Reddit, etc., the resultant damage done to the social network (in the literal sense) would cause Facebook to collapse.

This is something I have considered doing before, but without a network effect it would be ineffectual.

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Facebook is very heavy into user login authentication and if they don’t think the person logging into your account is you they will verify with typical 2FA, pictures of your friends, and requesting photo ID (I could be getting the ID request confused with account recovery). I don’t know what the roadmap would look like with a coordinated leak of Facebook accounts but FB’s login security would prevent a lot of shenanigans.

Intriguing but needs more detail, how do you see it playing out?

I would assume that >0.1% user accounts on most websites have reused passwords that are already known from other sites’ breaches.

... why?

To destroy Facebook.

I think it was clear that you want to destroy Facebook.

What is not clear is how 0.1% of users publishing their Facebook passwords on Twitter or Reddit would bring about the destruction of Facebook. It looks like[1] Facebook grows by a little over 1% every quarter, so I don't understand why Facebook would collapse if a tiny fraction of their userbase started posting spam. In fact I imagine their existing spam-fighting tools would not have much difficulty handling this kind of thing.

Facebook itself estimates that 5% of its monthly active userbase is made up of spam accounts.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

You can't use Facebook to destroy Facebook.

Their terms of service are not immutable laws. If the status quo stops working for them, they can restore old data and alter the bargain further.

People get hacked all the time; how would this be different?

Because a significant portion of Facebook’s value comes from the people who use and post to it. If that can be disrupted in even a small way, then the whole thing comes crashing down.

You could write a program that would sign in to a Facebook account, trash the user's profile and post garbage to their timeline. Or, instead of garbage it could be posters that explain the protest and how to join. Hopefully it would go viral and recruit more participants. The program could also change your email address to something you don't know and change your password too - committing to giving up your Facebook account.

For even more fun you could organize a day of protest, where everyone turned this program on, on Facebook. Though of course you'd need a backup page, Twitter, and/or Discord. Hopefully Facebook would ban the protest group and that could drive news articles covering it and get more attention and members.

Not sure how many accounts you'd need to participate - but it could go viral if other people saw posters (or maybe DMs to all your friends?) and joined the protest.

Just writing DoS + virus software is illegal. DoS is no less illegal because its Facebook.

I'm not talking about a virus. People running the program would know what it did. I also don't think it's illegal to write virus or denial of service software. Maybe it's different in your jurisdiction - but I'd be surprised. I've written load test tools that could have been easily repurposed for denial of service. Would that be a crime where you live?

Even if it were illegal, which, I don't think it is, that might only be a reason against going it. Many protests involve illegal actions.

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