Social Media Friend Requests

If you spend time on social media accounts, you’ve probably received friend requests from people you don’t know. In my experience, there is a good chance that many of those friend requests are not from your real friends. For example, the screenshot above shows only a partial list of my most recent friend requests. I don’t know any of those “people” and have only 1 mutual friend with one of them. My guess is that they are all AI-generated profiles from people who are trying to build up their networks and then sell them to people who will then use those profiles for advertising, information gathering, or other purposes.

This website talks about more reasons the kinds of people who might want to send fake friend requests: scammers, malicious linkers, catfishers, exes, significant others, or even private investigators. It also describes ways that you can identify fake friend requests: common connections, “attractive” photo, limited history, friend composition, and timeline content. The friend requests in the screenshot all happen to be Asian females, and they all seem to be airbrushed or AI-generated which to me were dead giveaways, and the lack of common connections further reinforces their lack of authenticity.

Professional networking sites like LinkedIn are also inundated with fake profiles as discussed here. While I don’t accept friend requests on social media accounts, my policy on LinkedIn had been to accept known connections as well as people in my industry who might be good professional connections to have. I’ve personally accepted at least 1 fake profile which I detected because that person posted a somewhat strange comment on a thread which sounded to me like it was AI-generated. I then realized that their profile made no sense, and furthermore I noticed that the work experience and education changed from day to day. LinkedIn and other networking sites have mechanisms to allow you to report fake accounts, so consider using them.

Fake accounts are a growing problem, and I hope this helps raise awareness and prevents you from falling victim to this practice.