I burst into tears when my friend tagged me in another Facebook post this morning. My friend died in 2021. The bot or scammer that had taken over his account was using it to promote weight-loss pills, which felt particularly egregious considering my friend had lost weight before his sudden death; it was as if the bot had scraped his profile for the most marketable details before taking his place.
This was not the first time I’d been contacted on social media from beyond the grave. Earlier this year, my best friend messaged me; that time, too, it was deeply unsettling, since the last time I’d seen him, he was smiling at me from his open casket. As terrible as these uncanny experiences were for me, what really broke my heart was thinking of how my friends’ mothers were likely experiencing the same thing.
I suspect that these “ghost” social media experiences are going to be increasingly common in the coming years. Our profit-driven economic system pushes social media companies to digitize and monopolize our social lives. This same engine drives scammers to seek out every means of exploiting our weaknesses for their benefit. A good password today may not be secure in two or three years, let alone the decades by which our social media accounts may outlive us.
Most social media companies make their money by collecting our information and pipelining their ads right in between wedding announcements and baby pictures. They seek normal social activities, like sharing images or starting clubs, and replicate them online, making them accessible enough that we become reliant on their platforms. This reliance is made worse by algorithms that keep us hooked and clicking.
It feels like a bit of a hostage situation every time I consider leaving social media: if I quit, I lose access to pictures of loved ones, career prospects and event invitations – I almost missed my best friend’s funeral because the information was exclusively shared on Facebook. We can even lose access to the parts of ourselves and our own histories stored in old statuses and direct messages. Once the platforms have us trapped, they must continuously tweak their algorithms and practices to keep pumping out money, even if it can cause harm to users.
These companies aren’t doing this because they’re evil – well, except for Twitter – but because they are functioning under an economic system that places profit first and allows those who make the most profit to perpetually change the rules to fit their whims. It is not only corporations that function on this logic: the scammers who haunt these platforms live by the same rules. They too must tweak their practices and systems to keep pumping out money while trying to survive underneath a capitalist system.
“Today’s most common online scams are often carried out by people from poor countries,” Ken Rotenberg, a professor of psychology at Keele University in the UK, wrote in 2019 in the Conversation. “These countries and their government officials are generally regarded as corrupt by international corruption indexes. Such corruption conveys the message that deception is a desirable strategy. Poverty combined with high corruption contributes to a heightened motivation to deceive others for survival.”
Scammers are obligated to be good at their game, and are likely to get better. There are already plenty of means to crack people’s passwords, and new AI-powered tools threaten to exacerbate that. According to the cybersecurity company Avast, 83% of Americans have weak passwords as it is. I am, I suppose, lucky to know that my friends are actually dead. Scammers have already used AI to simulate the voices of family members of scam targets. Simulating messaging patterns is a simpler affair and could easily be utilized to exploit the more distant friends and families of dead users, and forgoes the risk of using a living person’s account that could be easily recovered once that person discovers the ruse.
The more likely, and already somewhat present scenario, will be a social media hellscape littered with dead people pushing weight-loss pills and cryptocurrency schemes. Facebook has options to preserve accounts as memorials, but one study estimates that there are likely tens of millions of dead people on Facebook and there will likely be hundreds of millions by 2060. According to a Facebook spokesperson, the memorial pages only currently number in the hundreds of thousands.
While Facebook could delete these accounts, it would wipe out valuable personal histories. Social media companies have an incentive to keep those profiles up if they drive engagement and potential profit. To prevent this army of ghost accounts from rising, we need to radically transform the nature of social media from profit-based to human- and community-based, and address the underlying poverty driving low level scammers – though all of that may be impossible without addressing the exploitative system both companies and scammers must live within.
Akin Olla is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian US
