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Posted in Site News at 1:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 22782e717497f93d24be83999e1b6cf6Abuse and Imposters Online Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
http://techrights.org/videos/imposters-fediverse.webm
Summary: One major problem with the World Wide Web is a lack of authentication/verification; even X/Twitter has a pandemic of fake accounts and it’s spinning out of control in Twitter’s alternative (although, to Mastodon’s credit, action was taken swiftly when I reported the forgery)
TWENTY YEARS ago I was very busy in USENET, where I probably posted about 100,000 messages altogether. But people kept impersonating me there, saying horrible things using my own name.
Over a decade and a half ago a lot of online communication was done through blog comments. There too people impersonated me (posting phony comments using my name, calling people “nazis” and intentionally offending other GNU/Linux advocates). So I formally stopped leaving comments in other people’s sites and said any such comments would likely be fake (impersonation).
In more recent years I had the same trouble in Twitter, Diaspora, and now it’s happening in the Fediverse. There were probably over 10 such accounts already. So just to be clear, I post nothing in Social Control Media (old and inactive accounts may still exist there). Any account that is active in Social Control Media account and bears my name is definitely fake.
The video above speaks of the latest example of that.
It’s not a badge of honour to have fakes online, it is a nuisance and liability. Such accounts might actively promote illegal activity and terrorism, hoping to fool some people into thinking the real person is a dangerous extremist who lost his/her mind. █
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