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Users Can't Distinguish Scams From Facebook's Features
Anyone who's seen social media sites like Facebook has probably also seen scam ads that promise new features or insider access to the sites themselves. rudy_wayne writes Zdnet reports that a new whitepaper from antivirus company Bitdefender, which examined 850,000 Facebook scams over two years, shows that Facebook's own user experience enables these scams to flourish. The researchers found that scammers have infected millions of users with the same tricks over and over again — just repackaged. The most common tricks, such as 'Guess who viewed your profile (45.5 percent)' and 'change your background color' (29.53 percent) rely on a combination of the obsessions encouraged by the Facebook experience, and a general lack of understanding about Facebook's functionality — which, as most users know, is a constantly moving target. Users would be none the wiser that a given scam isn't just a new "feature" or another of Facebook's psychological experiments being done on users.
Facebook has a known history of changing security settings, so safe today is not safe tomorrow. Almost every major security change has been done via stealth, leaving users to race to go fix things after the fact. This is just a behavior problem with the company so not the same issue as TFA is discussing, but worth mentioning since "playing safe" is impossible when a company intentionally circumvents all of your efforts to be "responsible".
The design of Facebook is such that you can't play safe. Conversations are ordered based on "likes", not based on chronology. So you have to get "likes" to be seen in a crowd, and you gain more "likes" by expanding your profile to more and more people. Anyone wanting to be seen has to open their profile to more and more people in order to compete, so the design is to not have tight control over who can see your information. In fact control is discouraged (and what gets broken most frequently in security changes). Contrary to your last sentence, scams happen to appeal to the people that use the system exactly as intended and designed (the point of TFA).
The implementation of the moronically named "Timeline" feature which removed chronological based dialogue and replaced it with "like" based dialogue was when I stopped using Facebook all together. Prior to that, I agree that Facebook could have been used for conversations with smaller groups. Even if no "likes" are assigned to comments algorithms order your post based on content Facebook wants to be popular. Cat memes will top political dialogue if the viewership is a high enough threshold for Facebook to notice.
In the words of Nancy Reagan, "Just say No!". (probably showing my age with that quote, so get off mah lawnz!)
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
1) They don't care.
2) To hell with them.
3) Not the kind of person worth dating.
4) To hell with them.