Commentary
The New Inflation Threat: Fake Friends
- by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, April 16, 2010
I will now invoke my blanket caveat when writing about social media, to the effect that all these concerns are incredibly petty and insignificant in a world filled with Haitian earthquakes and Polish plane crashes. Fake online friends? I know: who gives a ****?
Well, I do actually, because I think it's interesting from an anthropological perspective. In short: people are weird and that's interesting. From a marketing perspective, I will add that it also threatens to dilute the value of social networks: if someone's profile is filled up with hundreds of people they don't really know, how engaged can they really be with the goings-on of that network?
Of course, it's a free online world out there, and every individual is free to accept or reject friend requests from people they don't know. However this puts them in a bit of a dilemma -- or at least, it put me in a dilemma, because I was raised to be painfully polite -- but again, these are trivial concerns. So you hurt the feelings of someone you don't know online: so what?
Nonetheless, the phenomenon of fake friends is now pervasive enough that a new generation of social networks (and social network apps) is promising to limit your contacts to only your real friends. One of these, Rally Up, is a location-based social network with iPhone and iPad apps, which allows you to choose from four settings for each friend -- "real," "feed," "lurk," and "mute" -- thus controlling the amount of information about you available to them (and about them delivered to you). Rally up has also foresworn Twitter feeds, in order to keep your friend-related content stream more "pure."
Meanwhile Microsoft is rolling out the Kin, a touchscreen phone with a built-in feature -- Loop -- that allows you to aggregate your "real" friends from across various social networks, moving their profiles and updates to the top of your profile on each network, thus creating a sort of meta-network of "real" friends.
Erik Sass is editor of Publishers Daily. You can reach Erik at eriksass@gmail.com.
Why would you be surprised that some people would have a different idea of what friends are or what social networks are? This has nothing to do with fake friends or not.
Even in real life people have different ideas of what a friend is. To some people, anyone you know and don't hate is a friend. For some, only the closest friends deserve to be called friends and the rest are acquaintances. Some people do carry these notions to Facebook and other social networking sites, so even if fake friends did not exist people still don't have a homogeneous notion of what a friend (on a social networking site) is.
The fact that people have different ideas of what a social networking site is should not be a surprise either. This comes from at least two sources: the sites themselves, and in how translators (including translators in media) translates "social networking site".
You certainly do notice that Facebook has long abandoned the idea that "a friend is a friend and not someone you don't know", and you could say it now encourages people to know people (that you don't know) through Facebook. So the social networking sites are theselves to blame for the proliferation of "fake friends".
And you need to know how "social networking site" is perceived by non-English speakers. In Chinese media this is often translated as "????", which does mean social network site but in the sense of ACTIVE networking, i.e. to know people that you don't previously know. Who knows how many other languages translate "social networking site" this way?
A possible third reason is the lack of predictable privacy on sites such as Facebook. The privacy changes are so unpredictable that you really have the urge to create a fake account to test if the privacy controls work. So I would say a lack of TRUST in privacy controls (and frequent changes, especially frequent changes that are perceived as hostile) also contributes to "fake friends".
I was surprised that you did not mention one big source of fake friends, the game apps on Facebook. The rewards from these games depend on interactions between a player and his friends. Succeeding in the game requires friends.
Since most of us who play these games probably don't have enough actual friends to play the game with, a common practice is to friend other players, currently unknown to us, thus resulting in a truly fake friend.
The players use one another to achieve what they want in the game. It's possible that sometimes these fake friends turn into quasi-friends. A certain sense of community develops, at least among players of the non-violent games, in which the players have something in common -- their pleasure in the game -- and share a kind of bond after regularly providing one another items that help them achieve success in the game.
Live and let live. Who anyone chooses to let into their network is their business.
Good article.
The irony is that many people in real life don't even manage that many friends, whether they be real friends/fans, fake followers, lurkers, etc.
One would imagine that the stress levels for managing and engaging a large network of friends in a face-to-face social setting are extremely high and almost impossible over a long period of time.
On social networks, it quite effortless.
It's interesting-people choose to connect on Facebook and other social media for numbers of reasons: they're related, they really are friends, they're fellow group members, they believe in the same causes, they're business acquaintances (or at least contacts), and even just for the heck of it.
I decided to track who sends me friend requests as well as whom I request them from, and asked my most recent one (whom I didn't recognize) why I'd gotten a friend request from him. It turned out it was for business reasons-he thought I could be a valuable business contact. We'll have to see! If I'd ignored him, I'd have lost whatever benefits there might be in being friends.
As for privacy, the rather painful truth is that anything seems to go once posted online. If one would rather not be found, then one might as well not go online (or at least should adjust one's Facebook settings!)
I have been fascinated by what Facebook has done to the whole concept of "friends," especially for the group of socially aggressive party-oriented teens. Especially girls, but boys as well. Lots of these teens have amassed their 5000 "friends" and are forced into starting their own Fan pages. These kids are obsessed, constantly online jockeying for position and stalking each other's pages to co-opt "friends" and measure popularity. They talk "friends" with a fervor, but never use the word "friendship." They don't care about privacy, gossip and backstab openly and are using social media only for "social" -- not considering the business and future career implications of their online personas. (I know some of these dee-de-dees personally.) Go out to dinner and they sit at the same table texting each other and posting to Facebook instead of engaging in conversation. The only verbs they use consistently are social media verbs - "friended," "fanned," "skyped," "blocked." While professionals are navigating social media to further marketing and business agendas, teens are living it. Where will they go with it?
THANK YOU for a great piece. My business focuses on pr/marketing and events. I am very protective of my "personal" facebook page. It's important to me that everyone there is authentic & that if a "friend" needs a referral source they can trust my other "friends". Friends/contacts know that everyone on it has my "stamp of approval"...The Fan Pages I administer of course are a different story- the more the merrier...
Who else but a true "friend" would also care about my 4 1/2 year old...or the non-profit I work with extensively? :)