InternetNeverSleeps
Los Angeles, CA
Female, 38
I oversaw all on site safety and security concerns for one of the largest social networks in the world. In the wild west of the internet, I had to develop policies and guidelines on how to deal with even the weirdest issues, work with law enforcement, meet with our government and address all the urgent issues that can pop up. My teams were the 911 of the internet, if you will, responding to the craziest of issues.
Hey Brozen, This question strikes near and dear to an issue that infuriated me for years. No!!! It's SO unfair!! Do people hold phone companies liable for crimes that are discussed via telephone and then committed? Does society threaten to sue itself for having criminals? No! Social networks are an 'online society', which means with the good comes the bad. And it's just another means of communication, like telephones. What it really all comes down to is politics. Social networks, especially a few years ago, were 'new, scary technology' for older generations. So politicians curried votes by vowing to attack social networks. Fortunately, I feel that this type of political pressure has greatly lessened, especially with the politicians USING social media for their communication platform! As a side note - parents are supposed to teach their kids not to talk to strangers - in real life or online, makes no difference!
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I think my employees and I could unanimously agree that child pornography is pretty horrific. Second to that, severe animal cruelty content - there was some weird video circulating the internet where a woman was crushing a kitten with high heels. Very odd and we all hated that one. Such a downer answer, though, so I'll also mention that for me, personally, I was also fairly disturbed by a strange subculture of 'diaper wearing adults'. Of course, it was never attractive people and their profiles were so creepy. Were they violating the Terms of Service? Not really. Were they bothering users in any manner? Not that I could identify. But were they really disturbing in the sense of hideous humans pretending to be babies with other hideous humans being their 'mommies'? Yes!! Overweight middle aged men peeing their diapers in their oversized baby crib is just not something you want to see. Gah!!
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Ahhh underage users. Almost all websites will state that users should be 13 years of age and older, due to 'COPPA' - the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (http://www.coppa.org/coppa.htm for extra fun reading). Due to this law, site operators must remove an account of anyone that they are able to suspect to a certain degree of being underage. Unfortunately, people under 13 years old will lie to get on the site. Fortunately, they often think it's funny to say they are 99 years old, which helps with account removal (since they are obviously not 99 years old and therefore it's a Terms of Service violation). There are various ways to detect if a user is underage (images, things they say, etc), and the website support team will review the profile in question and remove if they determine that the user is under 13 years of age.
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Depends on the website you are hanging out on! Honestly, for the 'social network' sites, your biggest 'troll' (pain in the butt user) are the teenage girls. They are VISCIOUS! Considering several of my friends are fantastic online trolls, I'd say 30-something males are up there as well. But anyone can be a troll, it's a personality thing!
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By themselves, I feel 11 is an OK age (depending on the maturity of the child) for them to start using social networks. I will add that this is AFTER the child and parent have discussed not adding anyone they don't know, letting the parent know if they see something that makes them uncomfortable, never to meet anyone from the internet without talking to their parent first, etc. BUT that is my opinion - due to COPPA, kids can not start using social networks until they are at least 12. Website operators can not have users under 12 and will delete their account if they identify it. I think for children ages 5 to 12, a "shared family" account is acceptable, where they use a special account that is highly restricted for sharing with other family members to keep in touch. But in this situation, the child AND parent would sit down together and use the account together.
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Ironically, I am trying to research a security issue right now that affected my personal Facebook and a few friends. Spammers are using my display name and sending spoofed emails to friends that are also on my Facebook account (but via email). OK So in general, Facebook actually has more limited functionality than say, MySpace does/did. On MySpace, you have a whole profile that you could embed things into and tons of other 'sections'. On Facebook, you really just have a few general fields and after that, you just post status updates. To be fair, MySpace was around first and got slammed with a lot of these attacks. Also, Spammers will always be first and foremost on an attack while a website scrambles to catch up. No matter how much you patch this or that, they still find a way. :( So there are several types of 'security': 1. When a user submits stuff on a website, does the website allow 'bad code' to go through? This kind of stuff is the responsibility of the company that runs the website. This is not that common these days. 2. Users getting duped by spammers, either by getting phished and relinquishing their password or through other means. This is where the attacks happen. No matter how much the website operators try to detect false logins/educate the users/etc, it is still really tough :( I think users are starting to get a little smarter now and more suspicious, so hopefully that is helping. Also and this is JUST speculation - I think a lot of users are now on mobile devices and the spammers haven't yet started to exploit that area as much. Yet.
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Money money moneyyyyy!!! That is what drives all spam, and most definitely the spam on social networks. Spammers are generally driving users to a third party site, and when that user signs up, the spammers get money. That is pretty high level - most 'adult websites' have an affiliate program, so whenever a user signs up and starts to pay for the content the site offers (that social networks can't and won't offer!), the affiliate can get anywhere from $2-$20 a referral. So if you send out hundreds of thousands of messages, and get even 1%, you can still pull a tidy profit.
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