Faking being on social media

and other parts of the internet too boring to countenance

July 21, 2016 — March 11, 2020

diy
doing internet
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Many people express the opinion that I am on Facebook a whole lot. I am not. I am only ever on Facebook for the mercenary reason that I wish to persuade people to do things for me for free, which is infrequent.

However, Facebook, business-plan-be-praised, doesn’t want to let it look like a void of empty performance of fake-smile social favour vampires, so they do their best to animate the stinking corpse of my Facebook profile, to let it seem that interesting things are happening. So easy to look like you actually log in! Wow! Much peer engagement! Very influencer!

Figure 1: Me on facebook

And Twitters; Who has time for the Twitters? Presidents and other unsavoury persons! People who manage your “engagement” with their “brand”!

Don’t worry, social media’s woefully dysfunctional profit model means they are incentivised to make it easy for you to pretend to be there. Yes I am totally flirting with you because you are nice not because I want to interfere in elections.

Anyway, you are supposed to be on social media these days, so the important thing is to occasionally water those social media profiles with some spinkles of content, so that your brand bursts or pops or thrusts or whatever brands do these days.

Figure 2

Firstly, use generic web automation.

There are in addition, specialised software tools for that, e.g. fbchat enables fake usage of facebook messenger, and messenger platform is their official API for creating bots.

There are some good tips in karicoss’s post on data liberation which could be used to do more malevolent things than they suggest.

Or why not fake social media itself? Binky is a deeply sarcastic app that make a fake social network talking to itself about nothing. You can have this overexplained for you by Ian Bogost:

Binky offers all the pleasure of tapping, scrolling, liking, and commenting without any of the burden of meaning.

Just want to automate those messaging apps? As mentioned in my secure chat notebook, Matterbridge is a

bridge between mattermost, IRC, gitter, xmpp, slack, discord, telegram, rocket.chat, steam, twitch, ssh-chat, zulip, whatsapp, keybase, matrix and more with REST API (mattermost not required!)

Even allows, e.g. bridging facebook messenger to a real app.