Make Sure the New App You Are Tweeting About Is Real
Our timeline morphed into a Black Mirror episode so gradually we didn’t even notice (well, maybe some of us did ). But the new reality will become increasingly difficult to deny when companies simply start copying episodes of Netflix’s darkly satirical five-minute into the future series. Illustrative example: Forever List Social , a new service that promises to use advanced artificial intelligence to preserve your presence on social networks after your death. (As if Twitter isn’t damn enough yet.) Oh, except that The Forever Social is a bogus – a website created as a viral ad for a podcast called Forever Has Fallen . But it doesn’t necessarily look fake when you come across it on social media, as evidenced by yesterday’s replies to this tweet from writer BC Wallin , who was retweeted 1,000 times and received over 1,700 likes:
My first thought was that it was some kind of joke (well, no, my first thought was “what the fuck?”), Mainly because of the FUBAR promo code mentioned. But a Google search found a legitimate July press release advertising the website TheForeverSocial.com (from which Wallin took these screenshots), presumably from Sweden. Although I still doubted that any company would actually be able to do what it promised – maintaining social media profiles of dead users on existing and as-yet-to-be-invented platforms? How it works? – it really seemed like someone really promised to at least do it. I left a link to the tweet in our Slack editorial and said it seemed too funny and dystopian in 2020 not to write about it. But then I went back to the press release, googled a little more and found that a search for the “company founder”, a certain Karl-Axel Matthiasson, only returned results related to the aforementioned podcast. O, sure. While this endlessly exhausting year struggles to convince me that anything can and will happen , this disturbing form of digital immortality felt a little over the edge.
The discovery process described above took me less than five minutes, but it also occurred to me that many of the people who stumbled upon the original tweet probably didn’t go much further than my original “What the fuck?” reaction before they retweeted or replied and then continued with their day. In many ways, this was exactly what Wallin was.
“I stumbled upon this in a Facebook ad that was just a hint of irony,” he said in a personal tweet. “I shared screenshots on Twitter because the concept upset me. I didn’t do any investigations outside the web page because I didn’t talk about it as something noteworthy [or] in a journalistic capacity, but simply as another thing that is annoying on the Internet. ”
Although Wallin does not have a large following on Twitter – about 200 subscribers – the post caught on with almost 200,000 views, he says. The reactions were different. Some people noted the origin of the “company” podcast, others reacted with humor and referred to the plot of, yes, the Black Mirror episode. Others seemed involved.
“A lot of people responded like it was real, and many [hinted] at [hinted at] an illegal business,” Wallin said. “I didn’t weigh, because even if I said something [to establish the truth], it’s unlikely anyone would see – engagement numbers in response tweets with refined responses almost always see lower engagement rates than the tweets they respond to. … “
In short, Twitter is a medium that favors surface interaction over in-depth exploration. People see the first tweet and may even retweet or reply to it without reading the entire thread to find out what’s really going on. While this is a minor and relatively harmless incident, it is an example of how posting something on social media, even with perfectly good intentions, can spread misleading news. In this case, Wallin did not claim the veracity of the service, but only crookedly commented on his 202 subscribers. But it started from that moment. I don’t know exactly how many people took a screenshot of Forever Social at face value, but it’s worth noting that today, August 14th, the press release that was circulated on this live feed from Australia was updated to invite readers to “check the website and Forever Is Fallen for more information. ” (Note that the podcast is actually called “Forever Has Fallen.”) It clearly doesn’t break the third wall of the embedded podcast universe, but it does at least prompt less cautious readers to do some research before creating an account and start preparing for digital immortality.
And while it is certainly worth taking steps to determine what happens to your digital footprint after you die – an issue that also cropped up this week when the ghost of Herman Cain began tweeting about the Biden / Harris presidential ticket (and note that Cain still … the confirmed Twitter profile has been modified to make it clear that the tweets are now coming from his employees and not from other people), there is a bigger conclusion: “Real” misleading news – from QAnon conspiracies to trumped-up research and brilliant documentaries about the pandemic – don’t come with warnings or hints that they’re just jerking your leg. Therefore, make sure you exercise your due diligence before distributing them to your friends, family, and followers. Learn how to detect phishing web news in social networks – and how to report them – and not in any way distribute them yourself. This business with The Forever Social is a marginal, harmless and even slightly funny example of why, on the Internet at least, we should follow the advice of one of the sci-fi series that helped set the stage for Black Mirror : Trust no one. This post has been updated to include BC Wallin’s comments and to clarify his intentions to share his original tweet.