zlacker

You raise an interesting point. Friend requests. I remember some researchers set up a fake profile of a woman who worked for the US department of defense. The profile was inundated with men requesting friendship connections.

I don't accept a friend request unless I actually know the person. Do people randomly accept these requests knowing nothing about the other person than what is on their profile?

>>Simula+(OP)
I mean IG et al are designed so “number of followers” is a visible metric of social status, so a lot of people do.

>>Simula+(OP)
I get a couple of friend requests a month, mostly from very attractive young women. I get a couple of fake requests from people pretending to be friends or family a week.

>>Simula+(OP)
> Do people randomly accept these requests knowing nothing about the other person than what is on their profile?

Yes, most people don't have a million friends on social media and will take what they can get, and the age-old honeypot tactic will never not work. If an attractive person shows interest in someone, they'll probably take it.

>>heavys+81
That's really odd to me. My Facebook friends are people I know from real life. Every so often I get random accounts (usually attractive women in random locations with no mutual friends) trying to add me and I will report them as spammers.

>>Middle+y6
I'm the same way, but the platforms incentivize the collecting of friends and have like a decade+ of gameification features to promote it.

>>heavys+hK
Perhaps Twitter or Instagram, which seem to involve people mixing their personal lives with strangers (idk never really used them), but regular Facebook doesn't seem to be used that way by anyone I know.