Kosovo’s Prime Minister at the time, Isa Mustafa, had something go wrong with his official Facebook Page, and lajmi.net called around asking how that could actually happen to a verified account. I was one of the people they quoted, credited as a “social media expert,” which is a strange thing to see under your own name the first time.
What I told them, more or less: a verified Page like the Prime Minister’s cannot be taken over directly. To control a Page, you first have to compromise the personal profile that manages it, and compromising a personal profile is a hard problem on its own, harder still when that profile is kept private and only a small number of people even know which one it is. Even if someone did manage to get into that profile, Facebook’s standard practice would have sent the real account holder an email the moment the password changed, which gives them a way back in almost immediately.
So my actual read on the situation, the headline the article ran with, was a question: was the Page really attacked, or was this an attempt to cover up something else entirely? I still think that’s the more interesting question than the technical one. The mechanics of a Facebook Page takeover are not that complicated once you lay them out. What’s harder to know from outside is why a public official’s team would reach for “we were hacked” in the first place.
Being on the other end of a reporter’s question, asked to explain something plainly instead of writing it myself in the usual voice, was its own small milestone. It meant the years spent testing platforms, tracking algorithm changes, and running other people’s social accounts had turned into something a newsroom thought was worth a call.
Write a comment