It made my heart bleed.

A month passed. Facebook hadn't responded. I stopped sleeping. I couldn't follow conversations. Words swam.

Reading the profile was like plunging into an icy pond from such a high distance it felt as if I'd slammed into a wall. And then the sensation of drowning.

I can't help but think there are people out there dealing with real, serious problems who bear them with much more dignity.

A professor I know had a phisher create a duplicate profile with the information/photo cloned from his, who then sent friend requests to all his friends, which a bunch of people reflexively accepted thinking maybe he got a new profile or something. Then people (esp. people over 30) were really confused over the next two weeks or so about which profile was the real one and which was the fake one, though I don't think anybody fell for the phishing scam. To avoid getting the messages the phisher started sending, some people just defriended both profiles!

Facebook didn't respond even after dozens of people clicked the report-this-profile button. Eventually it got taken down only when a friend-of-a-friend of his who works at Facebook promised to pass on the information to the right person.

I'm thinking of $1 million damages, with $100 million putative for not having an access to challenge and dispute these kinds of identity theft and character assassination.

So my question... Why wasn't "Lawyer Up" the first thing she thought of?

It's not clear that a lawyer would matter. Facebook would plead immunity under CDA 230 [1]. Facebook would claim that CDA 230 grants complete immunity to hosts for user-created content, and that the fake profile is user-created content.

The legal theory "you should have made your website better" has yet to gain a lot of legal traction. Maybe it should, but it hasn't yet.

[1] Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996

I think the same thing would apply here.

Facebook claims users used their real names. That's pretty specific. If they are flagrantly ignoring a violation of their own claims, their legal standing seem different than an entity merely transmitting data.

> The Internet makes it easy to casually carve up real people in some cartoon world. A drive-by shooting, a stab in the dark. A fast, vicious punch to the reputation. Easy to do damage. And awfully hard to repair.

Nice call for internet censorship by the way, these are coming up more often recently. But that's not author's main failure here either. Instead the glaringly obvious problem with this whole viewpoint is her alarming ignorance of how easily more fake profiles could appear all over the place. For a borderline Luddite it may seem miraculous, but it's really not hard to publish disparaging content about a person. If someone really hates you, they will do something like this again and it takes very little effort. For victims hitting the "report abuse" button is always a good step, but other than that a healthy sense of detachment is clearly called for. Celebrities (I use the word loosely here) who are that prone to collapse from mind-bogglingly childish psychological assaults should probably not be on the web at all period.

I think she severely overestimated the gravity of the situation.

Why not tell us the country and what laws there are?

The reality is that anyone can create any web page they want, and you'll never be able to find them. You need to figure out some other strategy to manage your identity, like advertising to your fanbase what your real Facebook profile is.

Personally, when I see something on the Internet (social profile or otherwise), I usually assume it's fake. It boggles my mind that other people don't do this. And that's the real problem.

Of course, I guess a fake account could generate their own keypair, and it would be hard to prove to the internet at large whose keypair truly belongs to you.

I wonder what kind of inroads Facebook could make concerning public knowledge of crypto by allowing people to post cryptographically verified entries using an SSL client cert.

I think the key message of this article is to realize how much power big internet companies have gained over our lives. And how they don't find dealing with problems efficient, so just rely on automated systems that can greatly fail people.

https://www.facebook.com/imike3 (You can only see this URL when logged in)

FireGPG users can auto detect the signed text in the page and have it verify inline in the page.

Just paste the signed text into "cat|gpg --verify" and done.

I mention my profile ID and username inside the signed text to prevent replay attacks where someone simply copies my signed text and adds it to their own profile.

There are some serious problems with this woman that she found her entire life ruined, and provoked to wanting violent revenge, over a kid putting up a fake profile with some sexual pejoratives.

How would you feel if someone creating a profile/website accusing you of being a child molester? No matter how crudely designed and obvious a fake it was, a lot of people, many of whom you might now, would believe it. These kinds of things don't just wash off and go away.

The customers are the people/companies who buy ads to finance Facebook.

Why would they bother that much with the user's problems - it's not like you can easily quit anyway.

If you always earn $10,000 a day in profit from customers entering your shop, and someone barricades the entrance to your shop for one day, I don't think you'd have a hard time in court showing that you "lost" $10,000 that day.

Comparsion to a store, earning $10K every day, then "losing" 90% because someone spreads a gossip that your store sells very low quality stuff, would be much more appropriate. Just an old plain defamation.

I'm sure Facebook responds to DMCA takedown requests reasonably promptly - and once a human is aware of the account being a fake, they would undoubtedly want to take the whole profile down too.

Jesus Christ, fly to Palo Alto and storm into the headquarters yourself if it comes to that.

I had friend with the same name as a porn star. Luckily, the porn star was in the downward portion of her career arc.