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Dead People on Facebook

And fake people, bogus people, entirely piratical search-engine spamming items of no value on Facebook


In addition to the problem of spam messages promoting Facebook, with ridiculous invitations from people that don't exist, (such spam messages may or may not be the fault of Facebook), there's also another Facebook problem, in which search results claim such-and-such a person is ON FACEBOOK when of course they are not!

This is a Facebook problem which only Google would describe as "spam" (ie search engine spam). If you find someone's business card, or you hear someone's name, and you look it up in a search, what do you get? If it's not a famous name, and not anything unique or distinctive, you tend to get some alleged page at Facebook or one of those other sites which purports to have a membership. The idea is that you have found the person has a page at that site. So you have a look, and there's some random picture of some person or animal, nothing to do with whoever you were looking for, with random details which can not possibly match, and connected up with other people who are presumably recycled from somewhere else as if they were paid as extras in generic movies.

It's easy to make an assumption as to what's happened there: Let me guess: Facebook have made up lots of pages of imaginary people in order to fool search engines into listing them? Do you think that's what they have done? Well, far be it from me to accuse them of doing such a heinous thing, but if they did, then it would be time-wasting nonsense in the extreme!

I have noticed dead people on Facebook, with pages optimised in such a way that they are forced in searches. This is in bad taste, but also it is a nuisance because it wastes your time when trying to find out about something in history. Besides the fact that such pages have no actual information and are purely search engine spam pages with random pictures of other random people, there's also the problem that such pages damage people's reputation. It would not surprise me if some people (whether living or dead) have lawyers to set about a class action case against Facebook.

My advice is: Stop wasting your time and money on Facebook. Get Your Own Website, (which is cheaper than paying monthly fees to antisocial-networking sites), and if you find annoying irrelevant Facebook pages coming up, put a negative match on the search, (which you can do with a minus sign followed by the word "facebook", for example search for: "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart" -facebook ). This eliminates bogus Facebook entries coming up in the search, and the same technique can be used for a wide variety of names. This is the same technique used for eliminating eBay and Amazon from search results. See How to Find Stuff

Less expensive social networking is available. However, if other social networking sites have people-impersonation going on, they too may end up on the Avoid list.