by Brian McCombie - Tuesday, March 22, 2016
The recent story posted on AmericanHunter.org about Facebook stalkers targeting hunters and shooters, “Are ‘Friends’ Outing Hunters on Facebook?” received a response that was both tremendous and disappointing. Tremendous in that so many NRA members and readers not only read and commented on the story, but were very aware that anti-hunters were hard at work in Social Media Land long before we published the story. The disappointing part? We were correct.
Anti-hunters remain active in using social media to target hunters. They do so by first creating false Facebook accounts and then sending us friend requests. Once we hunters approve the requests, these stalkers make misleading and outright false complaints to Facebook to get their new hunting and shooting “friends” banned from placing photos and other pro-hunting/pro-shooting posts on their Facebook accounts.
Consider these responses to our original article, all from hunters:
• “I’ve been getting these fake friend requests for over a year now,” said Suzy C. from Indiana. “Lately, it’s gotten worse. I get extremely tired of having to screen everyone just to add a friend. It’s ridiculous!”
• “One of my friends is a hunter and she decided to accept the request of a mutual friend,” reported Tabitha D. from Virginia. “Two days later, she found herself banned for three days and had half of her hunting pictures reported as violent."
• Shawn S. of Virginia had a duck-hunting photo of his reported for containing graphic violence. Later that day, he received a message from Facebook letting him know that the photo was permanently removed for “violating Facebook’s Community Standards.” While he’s been very careful about only adding Facebook friends he actually knows, he explains, “The thing is, sometimes if one of my friends Likes a photo of mine, it will be shown to their friends,” who then may report the photo to Facebook.
It appears the anti’s are getting even trickier. More than one hunter with a Facebook account now reports receiving a notification that their request to befriend Person ABC has been accepted. However, the hunters don’t know Person ABC and never made the supposed friend request. One hunter tells AmericanHunter.org she’s had over a dozen of these notifications recently and then has to go into her account to remove these new and unwanted “friends.”
Could it be these social media hackers have found a way to fake up a friend request acceptance? Stay tuned. We will continue to cover this evolving social media attack on hunting and hunters’ rights.