It also features comments about Alice Bergmann, the woman from Chemnitz mourning the loss of her sister. But in this digital soap opera, she’s portrayed as Gautier’s stalking ex-girlfriend, hated by some of his friends and defended by others. It’s just like real life.
The vast majority of the profiles featured in the fake network show photos of women and men who adhere to current beauty ideals. They often look like scenes from ads – the women tend to be between 20 and 40 years old and post selfies in bikinis; and the men, who are around the same ages, are athletic and muscular. The tone is generally friendly, with friends sending each other kiss and heart emojis.
There’s also a dark side to the profiles, though, as they pursue a hate-filled agenda. The fake profiles are used to disseminate racist posts, while at the same time venerating people like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. When political issues are addressed, the tone can quickly get nasty. Merkel, former U.S. President Barack Obama and French President Emmanuel Macron are among the declared enemies. The German chancellor is depicted with blood on her hands and disparaged as a murderer. One picture shows Macron’s face superimposed on that of “Star Wars” villain Darth Vader and another image, with clearly anti-Semitic tones, depicts him as a “Rothschild Bilderberg Gangster.” Obama is defamed as a “child killer” and “war criminal.”
At the same time, the fake profiles hail Russia’s president as “great tsar Vladimir,” whom they portray as being an exemplary statesman and the man who took down Islamic State. A photomontage posted on the Bergmann profile shows Putin in a superhero costume. In a comment, a Facebook friend writes, “Sanity prevails with Captain Russia.”
The direction of the accounts has changed repeatedly over the years. In some cases, the profiles were altered completely, with women becoming men and vice versa. In the beginning they generally featured links to music videos on YouTube and the postings were harmless, but political issues were thrown into the mix over the years. The Kurdistan issue has been dominant since 2018 on several profiles, although the political slant is explicitly pro-Kurdish.
The profiles include a lot of emotional photographs and comments relating to major events such as the recent brush fires in Australia, hurricanes in the U.S. and terrorist attacks like those in Orlando, Brussels or Paris. There are often lengthy political debates in the comment areas.
The fake profiles are members of hundreds of Facebook groups that provide an inexhaustible source of photos and stories. They’re tapped as raw material for creating the profiles. Sometimes, they seem less authentic. Some of the discussions in the comments areas seem like first attempts by poorly programmed bots to automatically generate posts. Others look like bad online translations.
The network’s real power comes through its contacts with genuine Facebook users, though it’s unclear exactly how many of these contacts have been established. One of the largest profiles has almost 1,600 followers, meaning the total figure could be in the tens of thousands. Among them are many who claim to be employed in politics, medicine, the military, as police officers, journalists, lawyers, psychotherapists, investment advisers or at Facebook itself. The point appears to be getting as many influencers as possible as friends who can then broadly spread the messages coming out of the network of fakes. But the friends linked to the profiles also include artists and others working in creative professions.
Article source: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/facebook-how-to-fake-friends-and-influence-people-a-4605cea1-6b49-4c26-b5b7-278caef29752#ref=rss