Facebook Groups Hijacked

Hello, we hereby announce that we have officially hijacked your Facebook group. This means we control a certain part of the information about you on Facebook. If we wanted, we could make you appear in a bad way, which could damage your image severely.

If a Facebook group you belong to displayed that message, your group was hijacked by an organization that calls itself Control Your Info, which claims that it will do no harm and only wants to point out a flaw in Facebook’s group-administration policies, CNET reported.

According to Control Your Info, if a group administrator steps down, anyone can take over, view members’ personal information and change group information, CNET reported.

Control Your Info representative Janis Roukkos wrote that his organization wants to get social-networking users to “think about the safety in your social-media life to the same extent you do in your real life,” adding that Control Your Info will restore the group name (which it changed) and leave the group “by the end of next week” and promising not to “mess anything up,” according to CNET.

Not surprisingly, Facebook users were not amused. A post on one hijacked group read:

I was just reading your Website. So this is your way of educating us about the dangers of social media? Hijacking a dead person’s Facebook group is your idea of a public service? Bullshit.

I have an idea: What if I teach you about traffic safety by running you over with my car? Is that how this works?

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.