I’m getting fed up with all the clutter and junk on Facebook. Ever since I heard that Cambridge Analytica hoovered up personal info from 87 million facebook users by getting them to take a personality survey I’ve become more aware of how much similar stuff there is there.
Some of it is just one question like: “How many years have you and your spouse been together this year? Or, “What was the first concert you went to?” or, “If you got a life time supply of the last thing you bought, what would you now have forever?” Sometimes they are games like, think of the name of a country for each of the letters in your first name. They are often cute or funny. It’s hard not to get pulled into it sometimes. I confess I did answer the one about the first concert.
What’s it all about? Are they legit?
Yesterday I did a little research on-line.
I found several articles on how to advertise on facebook. They encourage advertisers to use *memes,* those cute, inspiring or funny pictures with funny or clever quotes on them. They say that getting people to *like* something is a good first step for beginning advertisers. That way it makes them look popular so they will get even more people to *like* them. And this quote really got me, “Ask questions! Facebook users love to get their voices out and feel heard. Try incorporating questions or surveys into your posts for engagement. Keep the questions simple though…”**
So, we fall right into their trap when we engage with those cute questions!
I’m not against legitimate advertising. It can be annoying, but if someone has a product or service then they need to get the word out to make a living at it. But I haven’t detected any obvious product or service attached to a lot of the stuff I've seen.
So I looked up the facebook page for the concert question I answered. It was from something calling itself, “Grew up in the 70s and 80s.” It says it is a Social Media Agency. The only team member listed was someone named Nino Rostomashvili. Their contact email is: contact@egeekowl.com. Their address was shown as: 26 Nadikvari St, Telavi, Kakheti, Georgia. And no that is not the US state of Georgia. It is the former Soviet country of Georgia. I looked it up.
There is no sign of a product or service being sold to facebook users. I suspect that we are the product! Like so many flies bumbling into a spider’s web, we are getting caught in their web and our juicy morsels of information are being quietly packaged up and sold to whoever wants to buy them.
I reported them as a *fake* page to facebook. That was the only thing that fit in Facebook’s reporting scheme. I don’t know what facebook means by a *fake* page. There is clearly something there. But it isn’t providing anything useful to us. It also didn’t appear to fit any of the other criteria for removal, such as purveying hate speech or obscenities.
I also blocked them so they wouldn’t be able to send me anymore junk. Or so I thought.
This morning I looked on facebook and there was a post on my *feed* from a group that had a similar name, something about the olden days. I wish I had written it down. But I did click on the name of the organization and guess what? It had the same contact person: Nino Rostomashvili with the same email.
I just tried to go back to their other page and either some of their info has been removed or they are now blocking me from seeing it--maybe because I blocked them. Weird.
Trying to weed out the junk from the legitimate posts by real friends is getting harder. If we would all take a break from liking, sharing or engaging in facebook posts that are not created by people we actually know that would be really eye opening. It might help us see how much of what we are reading on facebook is at best time-wasting fluff and could help us keep from getting duped into inadvertently giving away our information to bad actors.
We might even be able to get through our news feeds and see more posts from real friends. And if it was a slow night and not many people were posting we could have more real face time with friends and family!
** quote from:
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