Photo by English 106
Louisiana recently passed a law making it illegal to impersonate another person online to stop misuses of email and social networking.
Maliciously impersonating someone else online with a fake profile will now be a misdemeanor in the state and could land those guilty in jail. The new law specifies that the impersonation must be done with the intent to harm, intimidate, threaten or defraud another person.
In 2009 someone falsely created a Twitter account under the Dalai Lama’s name and when discovered to be false was pulled. Basketball player Shaquille O’Neal was also impersonated on Twitter that same year.
A famous case was when a Missouri teen took her life after conversations with an impersonator on MySpace who she thought liked her. The 13-year-old girl’s mother said a fake 2006 MySpace friendship went “sour” and pushed her daughter over the edge.
Though there is no specific Thai law as explicit as Louisiana’s in prohibiting impersonations, there are other laws such as defamation in Thailand and fraud law in Thailand that can be used by persons who are victims of online impersonations. These laws are similar to laws in the U.S. and other countries that are meant to either protect a person’s reputation or to protect against fraud.
Facebook engineers recently announced that they think up to 83 million of its profiles are duplicates or fakes. They delete accounts they determine to be fake.
