Flickr Terminates Fake User, Red Passion
An interesting update to our post earlier this week about fake Social Network user profiles, created for marketing purposes. A Flickr forum thread states that the Red Passion user (the one referenced in our post, representing a marketing campaign for a beverages company) has now been terminated. Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield made this comment in the thread a few days ago:
"Actually, I had just come across this article on the account. We will probably be deleting the account, but I'm curious and this is FlickrIdeas: what do YOU think about it? "
There is some interesting debate after Stewart's comment - not dissimilar to the opinions voiced on R/WW, that Red Passion violates some ethical principles around social networks. But the upshot is that Flickr has now terminated the Red Passion account.
Hasta la vista baby!
Red Passion on Flickr earlier this week, pre-termination
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It's good for other users, hands up for flicker...
This isn't the same as a newspaper printing press release from a company and not disclosing that the text was written by the company. Flickr, and other social networks, are made up of user created content and as such I think it is part of the package that you never know who the content comes from. There's a fine line between clever marketing and sleezy marketing. A book publisher making a million fake accounts on Amazon to give 5 star ratings to its books = sleezy. A film company making a series of websites to make a mockumentary-type film seem real (Haxan and Blair Witch) = genius.
In this instance, I think this is more clever than sleezy. And this is probably an untapped market that Flickr should be looking into. MySpace does very well with sponsored profiles from television, film, automobile, electronics companies, etc. Flickr probably could as well.
I hope Flickr does not learn the Friendster lesson. Do a search for "Friendster's Fakester Buddies" to see the Wired article.
Similarly, I was kickbanned/permabanned from digg because I stood up and complained about excessive favoritism in the moderation, and arbitrary rules "enforced" by the Terms Of Service.
So I moved to Netscape's tagging/cool-factor thingy ;-)
Seems like those with adult content in Flickr are heading to MyBlogLog. I can see a few now.
I think Josh is right. The point is that you're on a S/N and nobody can cancel a profile if users appreciate it, even if they are conscious that it is a commercial project or a marketing operation.
Anyway... they did it. And that's all...
Very interesting problem that I've been considering for the past few years – and working on.
Wouldn't it be good if we could enable an online fingerprint/passport that could be trusted? This is possible using a combination of Content Labelling and FOAF (friend of a friend) in conjunction with companies that store verified IDs – such as BT.
So, no matter what virtual profile you create, it refered back to 'trusted metadata' (URI) that doesn’t change.
You obviously wouldn't want to force everyone to 'show' themselves with a trusted ID. However, providing end users with the means of choosing between those that have demonstrated how they can be trusted and those who haven't, is clearly a use case for enabling better trust on the Web.
Who's to say that respected bloggers are who they say they are...