Social media has enabled us to communicate with our friends easier and also has made us create new friends online. However, its dark side usually rears its ugly head from time to time in the form of trolls, cyberbullies and catfish accounts. This is usually one of the major complaints from users on all social networks and they have in place tools to report and deal with this like flagging or reporting the user.
Facebook seems to have found a way around this as according to Mashable, they are working on a toll to curb people from impersonating your account. Facebook began testing the feature in November to 75% of Facebook users. This is how it works: When Facebook notices that a person is impersonating you, you will receive a notification about the account. The alert will ask you to identify the person. If you report the person is an imposter, this data is manually verified by a team on Facebook.
Facebook’s Head of Global Safety, Antigone Davis told the publication as to why they decided to launch the tool:
We heard feedback prior to the roundtables and also at the roundtables that this was a point of concern for women. And, it’s a real point of concern for some women in certain regions of the world where impersonation may have certain cultural or social ramifications.
The roundtable part is interesting since Facebook hosted various women roundtables all over the world where Kenya was actually the first country to host one. There are also other tools that Facebook is testing thanks to these roundtable talks like a way to report “non-consensual intimate” photos and another one to check out photos. A person can be able to report a photo as containing nude content and identifying themselves as the one in the photo which would lead to the generation of resources like legal options or support groups.
This is the kind of privacy settings that is needed to make people in these social networks feel safe and it is high time a network known for its privacy flaws like Twitter to start developing tools like the ones Facebook is testing.
