A Canadian author reached out to Speakers Corner after fighting to take down fake social media accounts using his content and images.
Matthew Flagler, a published author, uses TikTok to not only promote his books but also speak out about social injustices.
“I cover all sorts of topics in that realm. It’s a lot of hard work and its daily commitment and a lot of research into these topics.”
He has found a fairly substantial audience, currently boasting more than 60,000 followers. But that attention has also made him a target.
“I started to get messages daily from followers, asking if I was selling financial investments, I said ‘I am not, why?’ They replied ‘because somebody messaged me with your name saying they wanted to talk to me about investments.’”
He then searched his name on TikTok only to find multiple accounts which had stolen his profile picture, name and content. One of the accounts had more than 20,000 followers.
“What’s happening is people are targeting creators like me to harvest their identity, to try to do nefarious things,” he said.
According to the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, a growing number of fraudsters are cloning accounts on all social media platforms with the hopes of stealing personal or financial information and possibly spread misinformation.
According to a TikTok spokesperson, cloned profiles are in direct violation of their policy.
“Which covers the following behaviours, all of which are prohibited and removed and that includes: impersonation by pretending to be someone else without clearly stating that the account is a fan or parody account in the display name or pretending to be a fake person or organization with the goal of misleading people,” they said.
The spokesperson went on to say while TikTok does allow accounts that are parody, commentary, or fan-based, they must make clear they’re not affiliated with the subject of the account through their username or bio.
But Flagler says his fight to get the profiles removed has been frustrating. He first sent messages to each fake account, only to be blocked shortly after. He then reached out to TikTok to report the profiles as did many of his followers.
“I’ve had multiple screenshots where my followers have attempted to report it, only to be told ‘no violations found,’” he said.
Flagler suspects his complaints weren’t seen by a real person.
“There’s no trigger to talk to a human. It’s just their reporting process on the app that is scanned by AI,” he said.
Mike Landry, co-founder of the digital marketing firm The Influence Agency, advises users to take additional steps to ensure fake profiles are removed.
“There are more than a billion people on TikTok,” he said. “You can imagine they are pretty inundated with requests. To combat that, there’s a triage system that they put in place with AI to deal with in-app complaints. Problem with AI is that it’s imperfect and often dismisses valid claims like in the case of Flagler.”
Landry advises users who notice their accounts are cloned to report it directly to TikTok’s website.
“For this case, he might be able to make a copyright claim. If he reports that through the website, he may have a better chance to force human eyes to look at it which often leads to quicker results,” he said.
After our inquiry to TikTok, human eyes did take a look. Flagler’s cloned profiles were quickly taken down.
While relieved, Flagler says social media companies need to have better verification protocols.
“One way to do that is through their check mark system which I have tried, several times, unsuccessfully because they make the process too difficult,” he said. “My suggestion is to have an identity verification process where you upload temporarily your government issued photo ID so they can verify who you are and only then you get on the platform. That’s the type of guardrail that I feel we need going forward or this will only keep happening.”
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