Facebook refuse to remove like-farming post despite parent’s report
Facebook has refused to remove a like-farming post spreading virally that shows a child with a disability, despite reports made by the child’s mother.
Our regular readers will know exactly what like-farming is; the techniques involved with deceiving or exploiting Facebook users into liking or sharing a post. One such technique is to steal online photos of sick or disabled children from the Internet, falsely claim it’s their birthday, and claim that people are ashamed or unwilling to share the child’s photo, in a clear bid to encourage Facebook users to do exactly that.
The photos are simply stolen and the story is made up just to lure users into liking or sharing the photo. It’s exploitation.
Take, for example, the post below which we’ve pixelated as we don’t want the child’s identity associated with such like-farming content.
Today is my birthday but nobody share my picture because I have disability Can I get a share from you
It was posted by a typical like-farming page, Service for Christ, and has nearly 300,000 shares at the time of writing. Like many like-farming pages, Service for Christ uses Christianity as its “selling point” to attract followers, and regularly publishes religious themed like-farming posts.
The photo, as is always the case, was stolen from the Internet. A search for the photo reveals the child is called Mason, from New Zealand who was fitted with a prosthetic eye in 2015 after being diagnosed with Coat’s Disease.
It’s not Mason’s birthday, and no one in Mason’s family wanted the picture posted in this manner. It was simply taken from the Internet to help spammers accumulate likes and shares.
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Not only are these types of posts immoral in the highest degree anyway, they also run the risk of the child’s family encountering the picture. And that’s what’s happened, since Mason’s mother Sarah came across the post herself, and she had some choice words for the people behind the like-farming post.
This is my son and no 30 May is NOT his birthday and stop exploiting his photo in the name of Christ – there is nothing godly about your page whatsoever
Sarah also revealed in a subsequent post that she has reported the post and the page to Facebook, reports that went ignored. She also messaged the page, but the photo remains online.
There are a number of reasons not to engage in these types of exploitative like-farming posts, and we go into many of them here, including how such pages could potentially be sold to crooks or used to launch scams. But having the parents have to encounter photos of their children being exploited online is surely enough reason to never like or share these posts, or indeed have anything to do with the pages that post them.
And Facebook has been notoriously slow and unreliable when it comes to removing such posts, and that’s not looking like it will change anytime soon.
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