5 February 2018

All right. You're on Facebook, scrolling through your newsfeed, and you come across the image of this cute but clearly ill little kid, with the caption LIKE IF YOU THINK I'M BEAUTIFUL, SHARE IF YOU'RE PRAYING FOR ME. Or it could be as simple as 1LIKE=1PRAYER.

It might be a photo of Trump, asking you to SHARE IF YOU'RE PROUD OF ME.

It could be a photo of Obama, stating SHARE IF YOU MISS ME.

People...those are total scams. Stop liking those things. Stop sharing them. They're not harmless. They're a product of like-farming and by sharing them and liking them and commenting on them, you're helping someone who lacks scruples or a moral compass make a lot of money.

Those photos of kids holding signs asking for shares to see how far around the world it will get? Bogus.

Here's the thing...those pictures of sick kids asking for prayers and likes and shares are generally stolen from someone else's Facebook page or website. The parents don't know the images are being used until it pops up in their own newsfeed, and by then it's too late for them to do anything. Their child has been used to create a dynamic that is then used to sell something--usually the Facebook page.

It works off of Facebook's algorithms. The more an image is shared and liked--and commented on--the more traction FB gives it. It explodes from a few newsfeeds to a dozen, to dozens, to hundreds, then thousands...and the only goal is to build up those likes and shares to an amount that makes the page valuable.

The people who buy those turn Facebook pages into commodities aren't nice people looking for prayer; they're racking up the numbers, in order to sell the page--along with your likes and sharing WHICH INCLUDE YOUR PAGE INFORMATION--to other not-nice people who then turn the page into something else...and what it gets turned into is typically pretty scummy.

You may have shared an image because you truly want something good for whoever or whatever is in the picture, but what you're doing is feeding a scam based machine designed to make money off someone else's misery. Every like, every share, every "amen" typed as a comment is doing exactly the opposite of what you probably intend.

Simply put: you're hurting someone every time you do this.

Consider how you'd feel if it was your kid or grandkid being used like that. Consider especially how it would feel if your kid or grandkid was truly ill, and their image was being used.

Consider the shattering heartbreak of parents who find the images of their dead children being used to farm likes and shares.

And there's another angle...if your Facebook account has been cloned more than once--and I know several people to whom this has happened--chances are it's because you've shared more than one of those images. You've identified yourself as a mark, and if that cloned page is never found and reported, it's then used to replicate more likes and shares of suspect information.

YOUR intentions are good. The results are not. You're being used and manipulated into driving up someone's else's value on Facebook, and they're making money off your actions. They're stealing images and turning them into something they never were, and your basic goodness and/or politics are being used for ill gain.

That cute puppy picture you shared, that said SHARE IF I'M ADORABLE and looked like it came from a page that shares nothing but happy fun things? A couple weeks after you and a million other people shared the picture, it was sold to someone else who turned it into a page where puppies are sold as bait dogs.

(Ok, I made that up as an allegorical example...but that's the reality of what happens. People take something that speaks to other people, and turn it into something horrible.)

And if nothing else gets you to stop sharing those things, maybe this will: you're cluttering your friends' newsfeeds with these. For every political/sick kid/wounded animal/military like-share meme you post, a real status update gets pushed aside. You're missing real things from real people, and causing your friends to miss real things from real people.

Don't be part of the machine that makes that crap popular enough to become a commodity. Be part of the machine that stops it.