A bug in the code of a Facebook update rolled out last week accidentally made it possible to see which accounts were responsible for posts to Facebook Pages, including those of celebrities and politicians, for a period of several hours.
“All it took to exploit the bug was opening a target page and checking the edit history of a post. Facebook mistakenly displayed the account or accounts that made edits to each post, rather than just the edits themselves,” explained Wired.
Facebook was quick to post a fix, thanks to a security reacher who alerted them to the big. “We quickly fixed an issue where someone could see who edited or published a post on behalf of a Page when looking at its edit history,” Facebook said in a statement.
While the fix was made quickly, screenshots began circulating on social media reveal the accounts behind several official Facebook pages, including that of teenage climate activist, Greta Thunberg.
And guess what? If you’re one of Greta’s 3 million fans, you might be disappointed to hear that she is likely not the author of all of her posts. According to screenshots shared online, posts that are supposed to be written by Greta may actually have been written by her father, Svante Thunberg, and/or Adarsh Prathap, a climate activist and delegate at the UN’s Climate Change organization—who reportedly founded the page in December 2018.
Greta, or someone pretending to be her, tried to explain the situation on Saturday morning in a Facebook post. “Some people have been asking who manages this page,” the post reads. “First of all, since last spring I only use Facebook to repost what I write on my Twitter and Instagram accounts.”
“Since I have chosen not to be on Facebook personally ( I tried early on but decided it wasn’t for me) I use my father Svantes account to repost content, because you need an account to moderate a Facebook page,” the post continued.
“The rest that is shared on Facebook is reposted from Twitter and Instagram by the guy who founded the Greta Thunberg Facebook page long before I knew it existed. His name is Adarsh Prathap and he lives in India. Since a lot of people thought it was my official page in the beginning I asked if I could co-manage it and he said yes.”
Greta claims all the content on the page was written by her, then posted by either her father or Prathap. “All texts posted on my Facebook page has of course been written by me, just like everything else.”
Some people have been asking who manages this page. First of all, since last spring I only use Facebook to repost what I…
Posted by Greta Thunberg on Saturday, January 11, 2020
Greta is listed as the page’s confirmed page owner, and it has two page managers listed, one in India and one in Sweden.
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Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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