What are the fake accounts?

Online accounts that don’t belong to real people are known as fake accounts. Some are made to be humorous, some to con people, and still others to disseminate false information. False accounts are frequently managed by bots.

Fake accounts on social media sites represent one of the dangerous diseases that are difficult to confront in light of their ability to develop their performance and discover loopholes that enable them to exist, and to cause negative damage.

Sarting with spreading rumors that target the economies of countries, and inciting a climate of pessimism, frustration, and despair in the souls of their citizens, Even encouraging terrorism and acts of violence.

Eectronic flies

Studies call these fake accounts “electronic flies,” as they are like annoying insects that are difficult to expel from their places of activity, especially since they are accounts behind many of which are robot programs run by intelligence services, terrorist or criminal organizations, and hackers, and each of them has specific purposes, whether attracting supporters, or Collecting information, or trapping victims and financial blackmail.

These accounts perform dozens of operations in minutes, copying, shortening, and pasting links in a way that does not differ from the truth, and social media platforms are constantly trying to scrutinize them in light of their growing negative role in directing campaigns, promoting political positions, and engaging in polarization against governments.

The issue of fake accounts came back to the fore again with the worsening deal of American billionaire Elon Musk’s acquisition of the “Twitter” platform for short tweets, which revealed that 25 percent of Twitter users are fake accounts and bots, so that more than 23.4 percent of Musk’s own followers number. 93 million fake or spam accounts, 41 percent of which are names matching spam patterns, 69 percent of whom have been inactive for more than 120 days.

Fake accounts are a problem on all social networking sites

University of Southern California

These results are consistent with previous studies, conducted by researchers at the University of Southern California, which confirmed that about 48 million active accounts out of 319 million on Twitter are not real, as they are managed through computer programs that rotate specific posts to serve specific parties and interests.

In advance, it supports inflammatory tendencies, or supports specific positions and promotes specific ideas, until they become the most popular on Twitter, and then suggest that they are very popular among users.
A black market has also emerged for selling followers of celebrities to give an illusion of their popularity.

The former New York Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, previously investigated the company “Divumi”, which was active in “social media marketing” and promotion on premium networks after its involvement in selling millions of fake followers, via Exploiting the names and photos of real people to create Twitter accounts for politicians, celebrities, sports stars, and media professionals.

 

Fake accounts are the most powerful weapons in virtual wars

Twitter bots

Internal studies at Facebook show that the problem is general, as about 5 percent of all its 2.8 billion active users currently on the platform are “fake accounts.” The company also developed an artificial intelligence tool that removed more than six billion last year.

A fake account, in addition to preventing the registration of millions of new fake accounts daily, and even Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the platform himself, lost about 119 million in audits.

Serious Terrorist Threats

The serious terrorist threats to these platforms were revealed by researchers at the Swedish company Recorded Future, which tracked the tactics of raising false alarms about terrorist attacks by republishing old articles as breaking news, with each link being routed through a network of programmed fake URL shortening services.

To secretly collect information about everyone who clicks, which Stéphane Trouvé, chief technology officer at Recorded Future, explained as behavior aimed at spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Recorded Future tracked reports of terrorist attacks circulating on social media that were not published in the media, which caused concern for those reading it and urged them to follow the link to verify the authenticity of the news.

It was found that these fake accounts have a fixed policy of capturing and recording
dimensions A visitor’s computer screen in a fraction of a second, and the same method is commonly used as a component of “browser fingerprinting” systems to identify visitors confidentially, without the use of cookies.

Browser fingerprinting is the method that allows visited sites to identify the visitor, identify him, target him with advertisements, and learn more about the followers of his posts. This process is done by relying on specific software.

Robot programs rely on the use of deceptive identities that resemble a person or institution, or the use of images stolen from others’ publications, and their danger increases if they create fake accounts for officials or celebrities, and use them in sabotage or fraudulent behavior.

 

Some electronic flies serve terrorist organizations

Misleading public opinion: Fake accounts

Osama Mustafa, an information technology expert, says that the main danger of fake accounts lies in misleading public opinion and giving false information about its trends and the behavior pattern of users, especially with regard to trends and the emergence of social media.

Mustafa confirms to  that these accounts are linked to electronic warfare and the formation of the masses’ beliefs regarding an issue, whether positive or negative, in addition to their ability to be colorful and proactive.

Whenever loopholes are discovered in social media sites by those responsible for them, those in charge of them develop their capabilities and restore their capabilities. Appear in a new way.

He pointed out that social media sites have been facing this phenomenon since their inception, starting with requesting additional data from users with email and phone additions.

Currently, artificial intelligence is being employed to discover, monitor and purify the patterns of operation of fake accounts, which has deleted millions of unreal users.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

 Honda Electric Car: Driving Towards a Sustainable Future

 

 

Facebook and Twitter

Facebook and Twitter are making attempts to purify accounts, and Instagram also deleted fake accounts and lost more than 18.8 million fake users in 2014, and began implementing a policy in which it tracks the behavior of non-interactive followers, reducing the engagement rate, which ends up being the same. Until the closure, and the platform users then began to achieve natural spread.

Assistant Minister of the Interior for Information Security

Major General Mohamed Al-Rashidi, former Assistant Minister of the Interior for Information Security, says that the use of the Internet has begun to grow in all aspects of life in light of the digital development that the whole world is witnessing, especially after the Corona pandemic, and the reliance on the Internet and electronic services in all aspects of life, which has resulted in crimes. An innovation known as cybercrime and other dangerous activities.

Al-Rashidi warned of the danger of creating fake accounts by some criminals, extremist groups, and global intelligence agencies, each of which has its own goal.

As for intelligence, its goal is to collect information, extremists aim to attract the masses and spread rumors, and criminals aim to inflict more victims and obtain financial returns.

He stressed that social media is not subject to controls, and any person can create an account without supervision, create fake accounts, and publish content on them related to a specific country and from within another country, to escape legal prosecution in the event of committing crimes punishable by law.

Fake Accounts are one of the most Powerful Weapons

He stresses that fake accounts are one of the most powerful weapons of information warfare used by enemies, who exploit them for the benefit of destabilizing security and spreading despair.

Confronting them first requires technological awareness and digital literacy, followed by legislative confrontation, something Egypt has followed, in the laws of information freedom and the protection of personal data, which transform Without selling people’s data to companies.

He also pointed out the role of the security confrontation by establishing an Internet Investigation Department that monitors harmful activities and plays a major role in receiving citizen reports, despite the large number and difficulty of following up on all these crimes due to their large number.

In addition to the technological confrontation represented by the Ministry of Communications, which has an emergency room whose mission is to protect Egyptian space from Any digital attacks.