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Posted by u/astolarz a year ago
Why won't Meta do anything about the "I can't believe he's gone" scams?
Lately I've been seeing a bunch of posts from compromised accounts on Facebook composed of an inner and outer post, with the outer post stating something like "I can't believe he's gone <emoji><emoji>" and the inner post being a link to what is obviously a scam site with an image made to look like a YouTube screenshot for a local news report about a tragic vehicle accident.

This simple pattern alone should be simple enough for Facebook to shut down immediately, yet not only does it continue but every time I report it Facebook claims it does not violate their community standards (usually a week or two after the initial report). Until recently, where the posts are deleted before Facebook's slow process gets around to actually looking at it.

Because of Facebook's complete inaction in this case, I've mostly just resigned to commenting "DO NOT CLICK" on these posts. On one such occasion, I got a response from one of the account owner's friends that mentioned that it doesn't show up on their timeline. That didn't immediately register with me as being any more suspicious than the rest of the post, but eventually I realized that all these posts are marked as public. So I went to this person's public profile (of whom I am not a friend) and was not able to find this recent "public" post. Both the inner and outer posts are marked as worldly public, posted March 14, 2024, yet the most recent public post on their profile is from October 2017 (logged into my own account, in a private window I can't even view their account).

This is either a security flaw or exploit that is being used to attack Facebook users and needs to be addressed ASAP.

ChrisArchitect · a year ago
Page owners can hide posts from their timelines while the posts will still be accessible/show up elsewhere on FB. This isn't new.
astolarz · a year ago
Ok, some questions:

Where do these posts show up for the page owners, in case they want to delete them? (Or in case these posts were posted to their account without their knowledge because their account was compromised)

Why isn't Facebook doing anything to combat cases where users accounts are posting obvious compromising content to their accounts in a way that should be easily detectable and prevented?

astolarz · a year ago
I've edited the title to more accurately reflect the point I'm trying to get across.
ChrisArchitect · a year ago
Ask HN: