SOCIAL MEDIA
A watching brief
The monitoring of social media for damaging content is becoming one of the most important weapons used by brands in the battle against online abuse, says Stuart Fuller of NetNames.
responses to posts made on news feeds, including updates. Some media channels picked up on this and immediately assumed this meant the introduction of a “dislike” button. At a question and answer session in California, founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed it was one of the most requested tools that users had asked for. What Zuckerberg actually said was that
I
Facebook was considering more relevant ways to express “sad” emotions, rather than a simple dislike option, but even so it would have to ensure that the feature was not used for malicious purposes. However, based on existing technology, this would be quite a hard task and something that immediately had brand owners across the world raising an eyebrow in concern. At present Facebook’s 1.39 billion active
monthly users hit the “like” button around 4.5 billion times a day. Many of
those will
be legitimate ways of showing approval or acknowledgement of a post, update or a brand, but some are likely to be fake. Unfortunately, it is simply too easy to manipulate the popularity of something on Facebook. A
n the weeks leading up to last Christmas, Facebook announced that it was considering adding more “emotional”
simple search on Google for “Facebook likes” reveals that 1,000 Facebook profi le page likes can be bought for less than £20 ($30). Want more? How about 5,000 for less than £70? If you can buy “likes” today, how long will it take these organisations to start off ering “dislikes” or other such “sad” emotions that could be targeted against a brand owner’s Facebook presence?
A matter of trust But that’s not the only issue. Social media are a part of our online life today, and 71% of online adults use Facebook every month (according to the Pew Research Centre.) We are more trusting of what we see online today than we ever have been. If we see an advert or a post on Facebook that has hundreds or thousands of “likes” we are likely to believe it is genuine. T e same is true of
followers on other
networks such as Twitter and Instagram. And if we believe it is genuine why wouldn’t we then follow links on these pages to external websites that have e-commerce enabled? So a fraudster who wants to gain credibility
needs only to buy some Facebook likes and he or she is free to commence a scam. T e approvals soon start appearing via an automated service or through a network of willing ‘workers’, all
66 World Intellectual Property Review May/June 2015
happy to press a button or two in exchange for a small payment. While Facebook has tried to improve its technology to identify and remove these ‘click farms’, it is a diffi cult job, especially when it is carried out by humans. T e addition of a “dislike” button is therefore
a good thing in this instance. Anyone who has been duped could make their feelings and experience known at the click of a button. Unfortunately, the owner of the page still has the ultimate administrative control and could simply remove any comments that display negative sentiment. Most major brands now consider Facebook
as a key part of their online digital strategy, both in terms of managing their own company page as well as using Facebook’s targeted advertising model, which is able to use more refi ned social and demographic data than Google’s AdWords can. It is understandable that major brand owners
are concerned about monitoring what is said across global networks such as Facebook. It is no longer enough just to have one or two employees who keep a casual watch on what is posted on social media. Brand and reputational damage can happen in a matter of seconds, and it is possible that hundreds of thousands of people around the world may be aware of a
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