The potential for this type of abuse has been around for quite a while and I'm not sure why it has recently escalated. Those in the SEO / affiliate marketing world who use Twitter may have noticed the @shoemoney / @shoemoneymedia incident involving Jeremy Schoemaker and a very odd "fan" who created an opportunistic Twitter account after Shoe's was disabled. The account said and linked to some rather strange things. Similar episodes involve a British man whose former friend created a fake Facebook profile in his name, and a school administrator whose name was used to set up a Facebook account that sends inappropriate messages to students.
Pretending to be someone else online is hardly new, but every new and popular social network brings with it a rush to register user names. The instant popularity of Plurk resulted in bigger rush than usual. Somebody pointed out that Plurk's terms of service include the following statement, which hopefully prevents corporate usernames from being registered and / or abused:
You agree that we may reclaim usernames on the Service on behalf of businesses or individuals who hold legal claim or trademark on those usernames.Upon visiting Plurk for the first time, more than one person found that their recognisable moniker or company name was unavailable. Being infuriated that someone's life is sad enough that they take pleasure in registering other people's identities is only made worse by the idea that people may do so for malicious purposes.
Take a look at this SERP. Scroll down. Edit: of course it shows up on Page 2 now. I wouldn't want this to be accurate, would I?
Firefox and Internet Explorer (at the least) will make you override their security in order to view the explore.twitter.com subdomain, but this is indeed looks a lot like SEOmoz's Twitter account. The problem is that an SEOmoz employee didn't created it and its only two (identical) updates are offensive and unflattering. Rand's attempts to gain control of the account were unsuccessful, which is quite a different customer service experience than that encountered by Shoemoney after his account was disabled.
At the time of writing, sixty-five people follow this account. Its two updates are hardly damaging, but the account's creator obviously doesn't have our best interests at heart and could begin posting again at any time. It's disappointing that Twitter has never responded to Rand about the issue. I am not sure how much of a legal difference it makes, but the account is also impersonating Rand by using his image and his full name.
I'm also not swayed by the argument that the account looks obviously fake. The account will fool some people who'll subsequently think that Rand talks like that in public and about his company. It would also be pretty easy to include more believable updates alongside offensive content.
Social media abuses like those cited about should be easy to fix. Facebook has shown responsibility in disabling fake accounts. Luckily, Plurk pages don't seem to rank nearly as well as Twitter profiles for user names. MySpace has a process in place to deal with fraudulent accounts and I've never heard of anyone having difficulties in having an account removed from their site, even if the verification process is a bit unconventional.
Where we are running into difficulties is when a service won't act upon accounts that misrepresent their creators' identities. What is a person's next step if they don't receive a response from the hosts of the fake accounts? Some people have resorted to suing the company involved, but should there not be an intermediate step? It seems that we could write to Twitter until we're blue in the face without a reply. Additionally, it's not worth our while to make a legal fuss about the account (we have enough real work to do at the moment), but we'd rather gain control of something that pretends to be our work and ranks on the first page of Google for our company's name.
And this whole discussion doesn't even get into misrepresentation on relatively anonymous blogs, such as those hosted by Blogger or Wordpress. Due to user-name squatting, it's becoming increasingly important to pay attention to new trends in social media. We even thought we were quite quick off the mark when it came to Plurk, but we were still beaten to it.
How would we be able to regulate online misrepresentation without creating the elephant-in-the-room web standards for content? Or is it really just a case of hoping social media companies take responsibility (despite a lack of legal implications)?
At the time of writing, sixty-five people follow this account. Its two updates are hardly damaging, but the account's creator obviously doesn't have our best interests at heart and could begin posting again at any time. It's disappointing that Twitter has never responded to Rand about the issue. I am not sure how much of a legal difference it makes, but the account is also impersonating Rand by using his image and his full name.
I'm also not swayed by the argument that the account looks obviously fake. The account will fool some people who'll subsequently think that Rand talks like that in public and about his company. It would also be pretty easy to include more believable updates alongside offensive content.
Social media abuses like those cited about should be easy to fix. Facebook has shown responsibility in disabling fake accounts. Luckily, Plurk pages don't seem to rank nearly as well as Twitter profiles for user names. MySpace has a process in place to deal with fraudulent accounts and I've never heard of anyone having difficulties in having an account removed from their site, even if the verification process is a bit unconventional.
Where we are running into difficulties is when a service won't act upon accounts that misrepresent their creators' identities. What is a person's next step if they don't receive a response from the hosts of the fake accounts? Some people have resorted to suing the company involved, but should there not be an intermediate step? It seems that we could write to Twitter until we're blue in the face without a reply. Additionally, it's not worth our while to make a legal fuss about the account (we have enough real work to do at the moment), but we'd rather gain control of something that pretends to be our work and ranks on the first page of Google for our company's name.
And this whole discussion doesn't even get into misrepresentation on relatively anonymous blogs, such as those hosted by Blogger or Wordpress. Due to user-name squatting, it's becoming increasingly important to pay attention to new trends in social media. We even thought we were quite quick off the mark when it came to Plurk, but we were still beaten to it.
How would we be able to regulate online misrepresentation without creating the elephant-in-the-room web standards for content? Or is it really just a case of hoping social media companies take responsibility (despite a lack of legal implications)?
Jane, I always wondered about this too...
https://youtube.com/seomoz
Is that the secret footage of Rand at an al Qaeda training camp?
The scary thing is that (most of us) have no idea what they are saying in that video. When you stop and think about it, it's a bit alarming.
Wow... wow. I didn't even know that existed. And what an achievement: they've posted one of the most pointless videos ever.
Unfortunately for the legit creators, a lot of the responsibility ultimately falls onto the consumer to be vigilant in their media consumption, to be aware of the sources and skeptical of the motivations. But, just as in the broadcast and print media, this unfortunately is not a reliable method of control.
Props to creators that put pressure on fraudulent accounts. It really isn't fair and they shouldn't be able to get away with it.
I actually meant to include something in the post about the unfortunate naivety of many people who may think some verification process is already in place. Much like people who thought you had to pay for email accounts, many users have misconceptions about how some interactive parts of the web actually work.
This even gets worse if you can't hold legal claim or trademark of a name due to legitimate restrictions. E.g. if you have some everydayword.com, it actually is (or should be) some kind of trademark and maybe known to be better than everydayword.net, but, at least in the countries I know, it's almost impossible to hold legal claim on that. So you can't do anything but beg and hope that everydaywordcom's twitter account won't be abused ... i actually had a similar "problem" on blogger, fortunately it's still an empty page, but I keep an eye on it ...
One aspect I'm curious about is how that account uses Rand's picture as an avatar. That has to be crossing some kind of legal line. Even if you didn't have a trademark and the account was just "rand99" or something like that, there has to be a limit to someone using your picture and pretending to be you.
Honestly, I wonder what the legal ramifications are for people who use celebrities or TV/movie characters as their avatars. What about Pikachu? Can he/she/it sue? :)
The trifecta (ahem) of SEOmoz's name, Rand's name and his picture surely make this account unacceptable. Damn it, Twitter. We'll try contacting them again...
It would be awesome to have a list of sites where we should go and grab our usernames. Maybe you can make that post sometime :)
But with social media sites cropping everywhere (In this niche and that niche), the real question becomes at how many places one is going to create an account. Just creating accounts for your business will become full time job for one person.
In my opinion rather it is better to create a strong brand that will dominate all other social media profiles. (In this case SEOMoz is really strong enough to weather such negative attacks. One SEOMoz to rule them all!)
Yes may be a casual reader may mistakenly believe the fake profile for a while. But sooner or later he/she will know the truth.
For example I will never believe the ‘You Tube’ video (which was brought to notice by Patrick) was uploaded by you or any other SEOMoz employee.
Yes for a small time such negative publicity may cloud the opinions of some people. But at the end of day one can not be everybody’s angel. I think celebrities (at least most of them) learn this quite soon and stop paying attention to negative publicity.
After all what's the point of being a celebrity, if you don't have any dummies of your own. So accept it Mr. Fishkin you are a celebrity. Do you need any more proof?
update: Corrected grammer.
superb idea. I may steal that idea. nah, i'm sorta busy but if I wasn't...
Quite a few question raised which I still fail to find an answer.
- how to be the first to claim your identity everywhere? Like Rand said above, that would be great to have the list, but I wholeheartedly agree with the commenter above that the list would be a pain to maintain as huge numbers of social media sites pop up quickly...
- even if you are hardworking, smart and lucky enough to claim your (brand) name everywhere, how to prevent others from registering many variations of the name. I remember joining "ProbloggerReviews" at Blogcatatlog and it took me a few days to realize that wasn't really Darren :)
- where to find time and energy to reclaim your right for the name? What are "legal ramifications" for people who use other people's names?
What I also wonder, is, by the time the site were to make it on a list, it may be too late. How in the world do we keep up on this?
I don't think it's practical to try to register your name on every possible social media site, as a way of preventing others from posing as you. There are simply too many sites and too many variations on a single name. You would literally have to create thousands of dummy accounts and profiles, and even then... someone with a creative mind could just come up with a new variation you hadn't thought of.
Maybe the best preventative measure is to be a good person who's honest and fair and who treats people with respect. As silly as it sounds, it has served me well.
See... no real way to know that the above comment is infact the real bruceclay that I respect!
I know this will sound crazy, but in the case where a brand is at stake or being used maliciously, I feel that the burden falls upon the website operator (i.e. YouTube, Twitter, etc). Too many people are lost in this "we can't regulate the web BS". True, we can't regulate the web, but as responsible web operators (and this is for those that run the SM sites), I think it bodes well with the community when they act responsibly. Some of them, I would imagine, have clauses in their TOS's that permit people from trying to assume someones likeness, or infringing on a copyrighted name. They need to enforce those rules! If they don't have them, it's time to step up and update the TOS.
(stepping down from the mic/soapbox)
So does this mean I should stop using my [email protected] email account?
This is a really good post - the idea of identity theft (and even what constitutes an 'identity' online) is really interesting. Especially when you start talking in terms of usernames and handles which are unconnected to a person's real name. Who's to say which of b1ogger99.wordpress.com and twitter.com/b1ogger99 is more real or authentic? How do you go about claiming that when b1ogger99 obviously isn't your real name?
This is quite a big problem in online poker as well. People are forced to create usernames to play online poker and people don't want to use their real name (for fear of being tracked down and shot for winning millions of $ off another player) so players come up with obscure handles like d0nkeynutz. The problem is then that scammers create the aim/msn/gtalk handle d0nkeynutz (or donkeynutz if the exact match is taken) and then proceed to scam money off people pretending to be the online player.
If you're a high stakes online poker player then losing $5-10k to a scammer is not uncommon. It might not have happened to you but it will have happened to someone you know.
All usernames in this comment are entirely made up - they may exist or they may not, I've literally just plucked them from thin air.
Maybe I should be trying high stakes online poker instead of old fashioned internet business services. Too bad I am a rotten poker player.
interesting post. I'm always hurrying off to new social media sites and registering my name, even if i dont ever plan on using the app. i think as more companies become aware that this can be a problem it'll get easier to address.
I never really gave it much thought....but as I progress in my career and this becomes more of a problem this is definitely going to be something I add to my to-do list as well.
I know Sarah Bird wrote a couple posts about trademark law's application over domain names with ICANN, I wonder if similar laws would apply to Facebook?
Jane - thank you for writing about yet another thing to worry about and add to my todo list. I was reminded of your earlier post about the people search engine that scraped content from various places where there were multiple versions of me. In that case anyone could claim to be the real version and confuse the online reputation of the other versions but it isn't overtly malicious and presumably doesn't have much of an audience. Identity theft and abuse on social media sites can do a lot more damage and should be better addressed by the services.
On this subject - not that I have any problem with this site I think it's great but there is no email verification when creating an account which does not help issues like this.
I guess it's easy to ignore this issue until it happens to you. Thanks.