Many Facebook users, including Northwestern students, have logged on to their accounts and seen graphic images of pornography and gore on their news feeds this week as a result of a hack into the widely used social networking website.
According to a Nov. 16 British Broadcasting Corporation article, thousands of users witnessed the explicit images, which many NU students said they started to see in the last week.
Weinberg freshman Matt Schley said he was in a hotel room with his mother when a graphic sexual image appeared on his home page.
“I was shocked. It just blew me away,” Schley said. “My mom saw it, too, and she was just baffled.”
The hack has caused multiple types of images to be released on news feeds, including pictures of mutilated animals, images of topless girls and sexually Photoshopped pictures of celebrities.
According to an email from a Facebook spokesperson, the social networking site has “identified many of the responsible parties” and “will ensure appropriate action will be taken against those responsible.”
The company said it has received complaints about the images and is actively investigating the issue.
“Protecting the people who use Facebook from spam and malicious content is a top priority for us, and we are always working to improve our systems to isolate and remove material that violates our terms,” according to Facebook’s statement.
Besides individual users, the hack has also affected larger institutions like the Massachusetts State House, which blocked Facebook from the computers in its building to protect its network.
It is unclear exactly when the explicit images began showing up on Facebook. Some students reported seeing them a week ago.
“When I saw them I was just completely disgusted and upset,” Weinberg freshman Alyssa Villacres said. “I didn’t want those showing up on my Facebook at all. A couple of times I had been with a group of people, and I open my Facebook and up comes this picture, and I’m like, ‘Wow, why?’ I was angry.”
Villacres said she won’t delete her Facebook, but she may start looking into other forms of social networking.
“For a while I was considering, ‘Wow I should use Twitter because Facebook has become this out-of-control thing,'” she said. “If I get another one, I’m going to be pretty upset.”
However, some students admit they have never seen the images. In an informal poll of about 20 students around campus Wednesday, the majority of students said they have not seen these images on their news feeds.
Facebook said users had become vulnerable to the spam attack by unknowingly copying and pasting infected URLs into their browser, according to the BBC article. This caused links to be posted on users’ walls, and any time a friend clicked on their link, the virus spread.
While Facebook has been working hard to remove the images from its site, several students thought the company should be held responsible for the images.
“They should at least do a better job monitoring it,” Schley said.
Medill junior Kelsey Stokes said it is difficult to say who should be held accountable.
“I think that their security should be looked at more closely,” she said.
In response to the attacks, Facebook has released tips to prevent the images from appearing, according to the Associated Press and The Washington Post. They advise users to beware of clicking on links that offer any sort of free products, to update their browsers and to report any suspicious or malicious content to Facebook.
