Zuckerberg’s Facebook page under bizarre attack by Brazilian trolls
Internet trolling can happen to anyone, even – or perhaps especially – to Facebook Inc. CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. But the most recent attacks on Zuckerberg’s Facebook timeline come from an unexpected source: Brazil.
The attack began as a series of strange images posted to Facebook updates made by Zuckerberg, such as his 2011 announcement of becoming a vegetarian or his 2012 announcement of his marriage to Priscilla Chan. Both posts now have close to 300 thousand comments and over 2 million likes combined.
According to TechCrunch, sources claim that the attacks against Zuckerberg’s Facebook timeline could be a form of protests against the low reach of Facebook pages, but there is currently no mention of any kind of purpose behind the posts on the affected pages themselves.
Most of the posts contain images only, but a few include text. Many of the text comments, all in Portuguese, translate to the usual internet troll material, using homophobic slurs or referencing popular internet memes such as the 1960s Spiderman cartoon.
One user, according to Facebook’s built-in translation tool, criticized Facebook for blocking him for nearly a month with no explanation, but most of the other comments offer no explanation behind their reasons for posting to Zuckerberg’s page.
Internet vandalism
While a flood of strange images and nonsensical comments in a Facebook feed are not particularly harmful, other websites frequently face more serious forms of online vandalism.
The crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia.org is a frequent target of internet vandals. Like Zuckerberg’s Brazilian trolls, some Wikipedia users vandalize pages more as a prank than with any specific agenda. These pranks include replacing article images or inserting blatantly ridiculous information into the text. Other users, however, edit pages with more specific purposes in mind.
Most recently, for example, it was discovered that a person accessing Wikipedia from an IP address associated with the U.S. Senate had attempted to change an entry describing the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture. The change removed use of the word “torture,” instead inserting more neutral terms in what the user called “removing bias.”
The change was reverted by other Wikipedia users several times.
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