Why are dead people ‘liking’ stuff on Facebook?

Lesley Ciarula Taylor 

A veteran Web developer has documented cases of dead people mysteriously “liking” a Facebook site.

Bernard Meisler, who is also an author and educator, tracked down a vegetarian who “liked” McDonald’s and a Facebook user without a car who “liked” Subaru.

Facebook recycles “likes” of people alive and dead so yours can pop up at any time unless you act to block them, a Facebook spokeswoman told the Star.

Meisler had become suspicious when non-English speakers started “liking” the Facebook page for his English-language arts magazine Sensitive Skin.

“This was suboptimal — not to mention extremely weird — for a literary magazine written in English,” Meisler wrote Wednesday on the tech website ReadWriteWeb.com in an article that 24 hours later was still being reported frequently.

“Then I started noticing something else. ‘Sponsored Posts’ were popping up near the top of my newsfeed, and some of them made no sense.

“A number of my liberal friends supposedly had “liked” Mitt Romney, for instance. And my friend Nicolala, a high school English teacher from San Francisco, had “liked” Walmart.”

Nicolala’s response to Meisler: “No.”

Two friends were outraged to find posthumous Facebook “likes” for people they knew. In one, a man who hated big corporations had “liked” Discover six months after he died. In another, a woman “liked” a tea company eight months after she died.

The account of a dead person has to be “memorialized” through this Facebook link to close it down.

As for the dead person’s “like,” Meg Sinclair said, “They would have engaged with that brand in the past. It could have been at any time.”

So too people who say they would never have “liked” a brand.

“Every time we’ve investigated, they have in fact at some point in the past engaged with that brand.”

If Starbucks, for example, buys an ad targeting “friends of friends,” then a long-forgotten “like” from you could turn up on a friend’s page, Sinclair explained.

To stop that happening, a person can “unlike” a brand from their list of likes on their home page or their friend can opt out of social advertising through this Facebook link.

In fact, the social networker could document for Meisler the exact moment Nicolala “liked” Walmart: Oct. 1, 2012 at 6:46 p.m.

The billion-user social networker had admitted to fraud in its system, however.

Facebook in September had announced a purge of fake “likes” on its giant social-networking site. The results: Zara lost 17,902 in one day, McDonald’s 22,446, Disney 24,664, Dell 107,889 and Facebook itself 124,919.

Sinclair explained those numbers are a small percentage of the total “likes” each brand has, and Facebook monitors its system regularly to ferret them out.

Meisler still questioned how it happens.

“Are the brands themselves doing it? Or are third-party services selling fake “likes” to brands?” Meisler wrote. “What does that say about the value of its data?”

A Philadelphia lawyer who is part of an advertisers’ class-action lawsuit against Facebook sees the parallels to his case.

The advertisers are challenging Facebook to find a way to verify the “clicks” on their Facebook ads that they are charged for are genuine.

The case, lawyer Jonathan Shub told the Star on Wednesday, is on appeal.