There seems to be this notion floating around that this whole Web 2.0 and Social Media movement is all sweetness and goodness. It is as if the moment you become involved that any hint of evil or people doing bad things has evaporated into the ever sunny sky while we all sing John Lennon and Paul McCartney songs. We seemingly have been convinced that all the bad people who do bad things on the web are being held at bay outside of the gates to our brave new world.
Unfortunately nothing could be further from the truth – no matter how much the goodness of social media advocates would like use to think otherwise. Whether it be from the very software that powers all these social media happy camps to the people that we blindly add to our friend lists nothing is lily white or crystal clear.
While I have written in the past [nw] about how the very services we use in social media seem to lack any concept of real security recently these services have found that they are just as susceptible to things like spam as any Web 1.0 service was. In addition people people are finding out that outright scammers have taken up residence within their utopian world of ones and zeros.
A good case in point is a story from the other day by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at Profy.com [nw] where another blogger by the name of Connie Reece tells of a user [nw] on Twitter and Plurk who has been leveraging their friend listing to bilk them out of money that was supposedly to be used to help this user pay for medical expenses. Cyndy relates how even Connie herself had donated money to this person before finding out the truth. In her post Cyndy quotes Connie as saying
"Just as social networks can be used for good, they can also be abused and used for nefarious purposes. When that happens — whether for good or evil — our reaction as a community is important. Think about what it means to be a good community citizen. Should we let angry accusations of being “self-appointed police” stop us from speaking out? Or do we take a stand against bad behavior?"
And that is the important question here – how do we react when we have been duped online. How do we deal with the fact that this supposedly pure world of social media has been sullied by people with no other interest in social media other than the fact that it is a gullible world just waiting to be plucked.
For as much as we might like to believe that our homes within these new social networks are safe from those mean and nasty people who prey on the people with good and trusting hearts the fact is that just as in real life the web – and yes social media – has its evil people too.
Just remember – bad people don’t care about boundaries – real world or digital.
Conversation Tags: social media, web 2.0, scammers, grifters, con-artists
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I decided to donate $10 in order to see where the PayPal account for LillyAnn was going. Had we been able to verify the need, I would have given much more and would have spread the word. But, as you know, we could not even find out the name of the hospital she was supposed to be in. I immediately began speaking out, as did a few others.
Unfortunately some people are embarrassed or afraid and keep quiet. That lets the evildoers win.
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