Just a week after the Boston Marathon terrorist attack that killed three people and injured 200, some people on social media are trying to insert themselves into the story.
After Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s arrest last Friday, Facebook pages have been popping up using his name or variations of it. Facebook has been busy taking those sites down, at least the ones that violate its Community Standards. Facebook has reported to national media that fake profiles and pages that relate to the terrorist attack that are in violation of the policy are being taken down.
You will still find pages and profiles related to Tsarnaev, but the Facebook search won’t find many of them. If you do a People search right now for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, you should get zero results. You still can use the site search on Google to look for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on Facebook but most of the profiles are disappearing as we type this.
Just as with the Aurora theater shooter in Colorado, James Holmes, some people seem to enjoy setting up fake profiles in the name of the accused. So, Facebook has to always get to work after a major criminal incident in getting those fake profiles deleted.
As we write this, there still are profiles on Facebook that use variations of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. One of them is dedicated to various conspiracy theories about the Boston attack. Another profile is named Derek Tsarnaev.
Like the other deleted profiles, most of the profiles that are still there will probably be deleted soon because they are in violation of Facebook’s policy on profiles having the real name of a real person. The pages that do not violate the social media site’s Community Standards will probably be around a bit longer.
There are definitely more productive things to do with Facebook, such as turn your account into a tool for SEO, and paying to promote your friends’ posts.