Dozens of Tech Bigwigs Friend Facebook Spambot 81
jfruhlinger writes "If you've used Facebook or Twitter, you're almost certainly familiar with 'bimbots' — accounts that have profile pics of attractive women, but seem to exist only to send send spam links with varying degrees of subtlety. Henry Copeland, the founder of BlogAds, tracks the social network of one such Facebook bot, and finds that she's friends with a long list of influential tech and media folks. Copeland also tracks down the origin of the photo that accompanies the account."
Not suprising at all (Score:5, Insightful)
she's friends with a long list of influential tech and media folks
If these people are influential or media folks as it says, then they probably have tons of requests all the time. They are "important" people that love to be heard. The more followers/friends/whatever they have the better. They aren't going to spend a lot of time sifting through the requests to see who's real or not.
How surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure most of these bigwigs are not actually managing their own social network profile, and that the Public Relations drone or Image Consultant who runs it for them is under instructions to accept all friend requests.
They are more like fan pages than personal accounts.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
But of course what's more likely is that these facebook pages are not in any way personal pages. They will be maintained by some corporate minion who has a dozen other more important things to be doing for their boss, and who just accepts all friend requests. No-one seriously believes that they're "friends", even by facebook standards.
Chances are that these people, if they have a personal facebook page at all, keep it well under wraps.
Re:Story link is to "blogads.com" (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it's a blog post written by the founder of BlogAds, like the summary says. He's FB friends with a lot of these folks, which is why he noticed. It's not promoting BlogAds as a company.