While social media giants like Twitter and Facebook have done a great job serving as a platform to meet and connect with people, friends and strangers alike, they’ve also served as a place for near instantaneous harassment. One such form of harassment is impersonating another person, often without the victim’s knowledge.
Facebook it seems is trying to curb the amount of impersonators in its ranks as Mashable reports that the social media platform is testing a new feature that will automatically alert you if it detects another user is impersonating your account by using your name and profile photo. When Facebook detects that another user may be impersonating you, it will send an alert notifying you about the profile. You’ll then be prompted to identify if the profile in question is impersonating you by using your personal information, or if it belongs to someone else who is not impersonating you but may share the same name and/or similar appearance.
While the feature is automated due to the vast amount of users, the profiles that are flagged as impersonators are manually reviewed by a team so as to ascertain validity. The feature soon expand in availability according to Facebook’s Head of Global Safety Antigone Davis.
Facebook is also testing two other safety features as a result of the talks: new ways of reporting nonconsensual intimate images and a photo checkup feature. Facebook has explicitly banned the sharing of nonconsensual intimate images since 2012, but the feature it’s currently testing is meant to make the reporting experience more compassionate for victims of abuse according to Davis. Meanwhile the photo checkup feature aims to let users know who can see their pictures and help them check their privacy settings.
While I’m all for Facebook ramping up its abuse-reporting features, I do hope their is a dedicated team who actively and promptly review cases, as opposed to YouTube which, has seen blatant abuse of the report feature, hurting content makers and shedding light in the broken, automated “report” system of YouTube.
Source: Mashable
