Why researchers on Facebook warn about this shrimp Jesus

A Jesus figure made of shrimp. Jesus with the body of a crab being worshiped by other crabs. These and similar AI-generated images are currently flooding Facebook, often receiving hundreds of thousands of likes.

The images are not just for entertainment purposes, but are often used by fraudsters to draw users’ attention to their pages. This is the conclusion of a research group from Stanford University.

These fraudulent sites specifically use images designed to attract users’ attention. In addition to the Jesus figures already mentioned, scammers also often use images that are less easy to unmask as fake. For example, other sites share photos of children standing next to supposedly homemade works of art, usually with captions like, “I made this with my own hands.” The messages are designed so that as many people as possible can interact with them.

What do the attackers want?

Algorithm makes the problem worse

In between the messages, the fraudsters then share links to websites with the aim of tricking users into purchasing products that do not actually exist, or divulging their personal information.

Many of these messages attempt to warn users about the scams, but researchers at Stanford University show that they are still successful.

What’s especially problematic is that these messages are also shown to users who don’t follow these pages or have ever interacted with them.

According to the researchers, this is because Meta, Facebook’s parent company, adjusted its algorithm some time ago so that items that have a particularly high number of interactions are displayed on Facebook’s homepage. Meta decided to change the algorithm to keep users on the site longer and thus better compete with TikTok.

(tonline)