The price of social media is eternal vigilance

The title of this article is a slight modification of a quote misattributed to Thomas Jefferson. The original quote is:

"The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance." -John Philpot Curran, Right of Election, 1790

It's important to get a little background on social media itself. The meaning of the phrase, at its core, is simply an exchange of concepts and ideas between two or more people using a medium external to the participants. Given the definition, the paleolithic cave paintings from tens of thousands of years in the past could be considered the first form of social media.

With this in mind, the timeline of social media becomes easier to track. Spoken language predated written language, and writing on portable media allowed for more widespread distribution of knowledge. The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg cut the cost of printing books and multiplied the output dramatically.

Fast forward to the advent of online communications. People around the world can communicate with each other more easily than picking up a phone and calling someone on the other side of the country. We take it for granted; the use of social media on the internet is as common to us as television, telephone and kitchen appliances.

The problem today is that there is a fast growing movement that is under the impression that social media is suddenly new and unique, and that it is in itself a huge money making business. It is not. It's not even new in terms of the internet. Email, instant messages, message board forums, IRC networks; these have been around for over two decades.

It bears repeating that social media is not a viable business unto itself, regardless of what shady social media scammers might try to tell you. Communications are a medium in which other viable companies do business. Social media is a tool for legitimate businesses to communicate with customers and other companies.

If you think social media itself is a business, consider this: How many people are charging money for email services right now? Sure, you pay for internet access, but you also pay for phone and cable. For all intents and purposes, internet access is simply one more utility bill.

It's also important to remember the dotcom bubble of the 1990s. How many companies vanished because they didn't have a business plan, or even a viable product? They just made dubious claims about having the "next best thing", didn't deliver, and blew millions in venture capital before closing their doors.

There is another issue to contend with. For every form of social media, there will be parasites that use it. Scammers, criminals, bullies and pranksters. And the easier it is to use these services anonymously, the worse the unwanted communication becomes.

For instance, once the internet became commerically avaiable to the average consumer, junk email became a problem. One of the pioneers of junk email, or spam, was Sanford Wallace.

Since 1995, Wallace has been involved in numerous shady endeavors involving spamming, spyware, phishing, and violating court orders. All told, he has been fined over one billion dollars in damages, filed for bankruptcy, and faces jail time for contempt of court.

To be sure, he was not the first, and definitely not the last, but he may have been the most famous scam artist on the internet. He is a perfect example of a social media malcontent and bully that refused to play well with others.

Next: Stay Vigilant »

These days there are plenty of annoyances on every social media format. On instant messenger services like AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! messenger and Google Talk, users are regularly pestered with follow requests from porn spammers, sent malware applications from strangers, and have their accounts hacked and used to do the same to the people in their contact lists.

On Twitter, there seems to be no end to the abusive users. Fake accounts that use scripts to monitor the public timeline for certain keywords and send them fake replies that advertise their wares. Similar methods are used by accounts to auto-follow legitimate users; it's subtle because it depends on those users to receive email notices of new followers, which gets them to look at the spammer's bio.

Some scammy individuals bulk up their follower counts by using tools to follow thousands of other users, and then unfollow the ones that don't follow them back. The purpose is to make it appear as if they are somehow important, popular people that should be paid attention to. They are not. Their twitter timeline is typically full of links to less-than-legitimate services and products.

There are similar issues to be found on Facebook. Aside from the normal scams, there's the privacy issues. In spite of their claims of improved privacy, Facebook has a history of reducing or removing privacy from their users.

It's my belief that the primary reason that Facebook keeps doing this to their users is to make money from the third-party application developers and to sell this information to advertisers. The problem is that Facebook usually does this without asking their users for permission first. They make be able to get away with it in the US, but they'll find it much more difficult to pull off in the European Union.

There are plenty of malware applications designed to take advantage of the users as well. Some are seemingly innocuous, but since Facebook pretty much lets app developers have access to all user account information, they can use that access to mine personal user information to sell to advertisers. Other apps are designed to take control of a user's account and send out spam on the malware developer's behalf.

These days, it pays to be prepared. The internet is not all light and roses. There is a dark side to it, and those that roam the shadows will take advantage of the naive and ignorant.

Stay secure on the social media services. Change your passwords regularly and use difficult to guess ones. Control access to your computer, and make sure you log out of your social media services whenever you leave a computer that isn't yours, even if it's only for a minute. I've written articles on personal computer security and protecting your personal data online here on ZDNet in the past.

It's also important to not just protect yourself from the scammers and malware. You should also report them to the administrators of the services you use. Email spam is nearly impossible to report these days, since the majority of it comes from botnet-infected computers controlled by criminal organizations that sell access to spammers. You can report the scammers on Twitter, though; they even have a button to click that both blocks the spammer and reports them for spam. Facebook also takes spam seriously and provides tools to report it.

Finally, a quote mis-attributed to Edmund Burke: "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.". The original quote from which this derives is this:

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." - Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents, 1770

Regardless of the arrangement of words, the substance remains clear: Stay vigilant.