Thousands of Philippine journalists and students found Facebook accounts made in their names, with ghost-like profiles, no pictures, and misspellings.
Thousands of Philippine journalists and students found Facebook accounts made in their names, with ghost-like profiles, no pictures, and misspellings.Many people in the Philippines found that their Facebook accounts had been cloned, and some cloned accounts were messaging the real owners with death threats. Student publications from the state-run Polytechnic University of the Philippines, the Catalyst posted screenshots of threatening messages from the dummy accounts of real owners. It has been reported that the dummy accounts targeted people, mainly students and journalists, who have been critics of the government and have most recently criticized the 'anti-terrorism bill' which critics have said will stifle free speech. The hashtag #HandsOffOurStudents has been trending on twitter.
The Philippines’s Justice Department has announced an investigation, while the National Privacy Commission said it was monitoring the situation. Victor Lorenzo, an official with the National Bureau of Investigation, said that the dummy accounts could have been caused by a glitch because Facebook's protocols prohibit mass creation of accounts within such a short period. Although analysts have said the cloning was no accident, and the sheer scale of it indicates that it was highly organized and coordinated. The investigation is currently underway.
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