Umran Hussain
In Kashmir you may have come across hundreds of Facebook users crying foul while sharing a post on their feed that reads “My Facebook account has been hacked, if anybody receives any kind of vulgar or obscene picture, the picture is not shared by me.”
Genuinely, there are some cases of hacking too that compromise the security of your Facebook account, but the question is, why should a “hacker” hack an account that is worth nothing?.
History stands testimony to the fact that Facebook accounts or Twitter accounts of hundreds of celebrities have been hacked or their security breached, but by sneaking into such high profile Facebook or Twitter accounts, a hacker finds a bigger prey and can use it the way he wishes to.
Once such profile of celebrities or politicians are hacked, you will never come across a message that informs the users not to trust the contents of the messages or posts because my account stands hacked, rather they would inform the media and the goverment swings into action to get the account back.
Hackers try to get control of an account with a huge following that reaches millions of people, so that they can benefit by one way or the other from such accounts.
Hacking a Facebook or a Twitter account that is made to interact with a few friends doesn’t seem to be of any use to the hackers, such accounts are in no way going to benefit them, but quite interestingly, most of the users using a simple Facebook account with no such activity that attracts thousands of audience, can be seen crying foul quite often.
Coincidentally, such internet users only share the message of so called “hacking” on their profiles when a “nude picture, video or any other obscene material pops up on their feed or stories.” This is not an indication of an account getting hacked.
Such Facebook or Twitter users are seen easily logging into their accounts and posting the messages of “hacking” easily on the wall. Did you ever ask them a question, “if your accounts has been hacked, how in the heavens are you able to log in and post messages on your wall?”
In 99 percent of the cases, once an account is hacked, a person loses access to his account thereafter.
Such people do directly or indirectly make fool of the masses. Let me share something technical and logical about all this imbroglio.
“After loosing access to his account, a Facebook or a Twitter user cannot rule out “hacking” in the first instance. He doesn’t come to know about it after his friends on Facebook informed him, but he himself gets to know about it.” Said Rouf Raaif, a content creator from Kashmir.
“In contrast to the above user, then there are other users in question. You may have noticed that such users only come to know about the hacking of their accounts after their online friends inform them about a picture or a video the he should not have shared. Only after he gets to know about it through his online friend circle, he starts playing the victim card of being a poor internet user whose account has been hacked.” Said Rouf.
Now the question is, how does his online friends notice that the account of their friend has been compromised?. To understand this puzzle, you need to first understand how the Facebook feed works? Here is the answer:
“For the sake of convenience, I am trying not to use the heaviest of technical words, for the readers to understand the contents of this information better, I am using a layman’s language to make you feel comfortable while you read this text.”
Let’s put it this way: You have some three thousand friends on your Facebook and the platform is not concerned about your relation with all the 3000 people in your friend list. You have those three thousand people and remember they too have you in their list, because you have mutually agreed to be friends on Facebook.
Now, any sort of activity you perform on Facebook is noticed by all the three thousand friends of yours, not only this if any of them pokes his nose into your activity, then all his friends come to know about the contents you have posted on your feed and the cycle goes on and on and finally it becomes what we call a “viral” Facebook post. Interestingly, you cannot even sue the social media giant for whatever happened with your post, your post was public for all practical reasons and you, yes only you just shared a post that was obscene, you either, liked it, shared it or commented on it. Remember, every activity of yours is being watched and noticed by your friends.
Using social media with all our senses properly working, is what can save us from this disaster. It is not only me who knows your secret, that “Your account was not hacked” there are thousands of people who are aware of this mess. The only good thing in them is, “they don’t expose you.”
Umran Hussain is a blogger and works as online editor for The Kashmir Radar. He can be reached at umranhussainkr@gmail.com.
