Facebook, Washington State Sue Firm Over Clickjacking

Trailrunner7 writes "Facebook and the state of Washington are suing an ad network they accuse of encouraging people to spread spam through clickjacking schemes and other tactics. The company at the center of the allegations, Adscend Media, denies the charges and said it will fight them vigorously. According to the office of Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna, the company paid and encouraged scammers to design Facebook pages to bait users into visiting Websites that pay the company. The bait pages would appear in posts that seem to originate from a person's Facebook friends and offer visitors an opportunity to view 'provocative' content in exchange for clicking the 'like' button on the Facebook page."

Comments

Incentivized likes

[sakdoctor]

Facebook is designed to spread SHIT as a core feature; it's a spam machine.
Are you really saying there is a distinction between good and evil "likes"?

Re:Incentivized likes

[Anonymous Coward]

It's (usually) hated amongst the smart people. There are more stupid people than smart people.

Re:Incentivized likes

[Ethanol-fueled]

NASCAR at least has a significant number of fans who appreciate it because they have background knowledge in auto mechanics and racing. To the average layman, it's a bunch of fat rednecks watching cars drive in circles, waiting for the next crash. But the truth is that a good number of those "laymen" fans are taking into account a multitude of background knowledge like bore, stroke, gear ratios, camber, statistics, power/weight ratio, turbocharging, supercharging, etc; all of which add tremendously to the experience.

You know that feeling yourself when you try to mouth off the specs of your computer or WoW character to somebody who doesn't know or care.

Facebook, on the other hand, is not itself interesting, even to most technically inclined folks. The only people who care about its technical internals or operation are its employees. Everybody else just uses it for attention and circle-jerking.

Who Watches the Coastguard?

[dangitman]

The irony is thick with this one.

"Social Media" is basically designed to be click-bait. That's the only way they can recoup the investment money from the Venture Capitalists.

Sure, they might all start out being about "connecting and sharing with your friends" but then they hit critical mass and have to make some money. So they turn into whoring advertising machines. No longer are you just following your friends, but you're suckered into following companies, so you can win tickets to a Lady Gaga concert.

Now they complain about "clickjacking"?

Fuck "social media", and fuck Slashdot for putting goddamned Facebook and Twitter links under every fucking post.

Re:Who Watches the Coastguard?

[zippthorne]

The really shitty thing about Facebook is that it doesn't just affect the people who somehow got suckered into using it. It also affects everybody that uses the internet to do anything at all. Stupid [F] and Like buttons cluttering up every g'dang page out there with their third-party javascript includes and whatnot, slowing everything down.

Which brings me to my secondary, related, rant - why is it that it's always the advertising taking too damn long to load that slows down pages while browsing? Shouldn't those bits be the fastest-loading parts of the page, since the advertising companies make their money by spitting out images and things to be viewed? If all I see is a box and an hourglass, I'm not going to know what stupid product I'm supposed to start buying....

Oh, yeah, and the privacy thing, too. In fifteen years, we're not going to have D's and R's in congress any more, but not because things will have improved. Instead, we're going to have the whomever the hell Mark Zuckerberg feels like keeping drunk party pictures under wraps for party...

Re:Who Watches the Coastguard?

[dangitman]

Personally, I prefer to confront reality head-on. Hiding the bullshit just inoculates you to what's really happening.

Where's the incentive to support sites that don't engage in shitty practices, if you can make the shitty sites seem better by hiding what they actually do?