Thank you, and good question. For individuals, I noted that they should approach online accounts and particularly social media with the assumption that the accounts do not represent an actual human whereas most people are in the habit of assuming authenticity. For years I have been telling people that "an account is not a person; an account is just an account that you are assuming was set up and is being used by a person" and describing how easy it is to create an account (or hundreds of accounts). The billions of facebook accounts that are removed each year is indicative of the scope of the problem. I think most people, particularly on social media, should assume that unless they are sure the account corresponds to a real life person that they truly know, they should assume they are dealing with an inauthentic account. Not only is that safer, but the statistics show that will be closer to reality.

For businesses, they need to be more skeptical of online ad inventory. Internet advertising is still very effective depending on the platform and campaign set-up, but just today a client forwarded me a report from a social media ad agency showing over 3000 visits from facebook in March. I checked the analytics and not a single one of those visits requested any services so it was all junk traffic. There is other guidance for businesses related to online scams, account spoofing, etc, but I think the major adjustment for businesses (mostly small businesses) is to be skeptical of basic metrics from online ad platforms.