Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Social Media
  3. News

Ohio man arrested over parody of police department’s Facebook page

Trevor Mogg
By

facebook cops imitation page parma police
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but try telling that to the cops of Parma, Ohio.

After coming across a parody Facebook page mimicking its own site, police in the town decided to arrest its creator for “disrupting public services.”

Recommended Videos

Parma resident Anthony Novak launched the site earlier this month, filling it with content that the police department described as “derogatory” and “inflammatory.” Speaking to Cleveland.com, Lt. Kevin Riley said the material was presented in a way that suggested it was coming directly from department officials.

Related

The page, which has since been taken offline, closely mimicked the design of Parma cops’ Facebook page, and included fake news stories and information that the department said painted it in a bad light.

One note read: “Parma is an equal opportunity employer but is strongly encouraging minorities not to apply,” while another claimed Parma police would be offering “free abortions to teens” at a forthcoming fundraiser. You get the idea.

After finding the site, Parma PD put a notice on its own page, saying it wanted to “warn the public that a fake Parma Police Facebook page has been created.” It went on, “The public should disregard any and all information posted on the fake Facebook account. The individual(s) who created this fake account are not employed by the police department.”

The vast majority of the 450+ comments on Parma PD’s Facebook post lambast the cops’ response to Novak, suggesting the department’s been way too heavy-handed in its approach. One wrote, “You get Facebook to take down the page, sure. Arresting the man who put it up is tyrannical, full stop. Arresting someone who mocked you in public is the very essence of a free speech violation.” Another said simply, “Humorless robots, well done.”

It won’t come as a big surprise to learn that the department’s actions and the resulting publicity have led to the creation of a load more imitation sites (here, here, and here, for example) criticizing or poking fun at Parma police, though it’s hard to believe cops will be knocking on the creators’ doors anytime soon.

Novak, 27, made his first court appearance on Monday. A grand jury will ultimately decide if he’s to face trial for his alleged offense. If it goes all the way, he could face up to 18 months in prison.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Facebook delays the launch of its dating app in Europe over privacy concerns
Facebook Dating

Facebook Dating, which launched last September in the US, has hit a major snag in Europe. 

On Wednesday, the Data Protection Commission (DPC), an independent consumer protection agency, announced it was “very concerned” about Facebook’s desire to expedite the feature across the European Union, leading the social media giant to stall its rollout indefinitely. 

Read more
Facebook forced to pay $550 million settlement over facial recognition lawsuit
Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Financial Services Committee on "An Examination of Facebook and Its Impact on the Financial Services and Housing Sectors" in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC on October 23, 2019.

Facebook is going to have to pay quite a few people money as part of the settlement of a facial-recognition lawsuit. The catch is you have to live in Illinois.

Illinois has some of the strictest biometric privacy laws, and a 2015 lawsuit alleges that the social network violated these laws through the use of facial-recognition software in its photo tag feature without people’s consent. Illinois’ 2008 law requires companies to obtain permission before using people’s biometric data and be transparent with how the data is used and kept.

Read more
Facebook has suspended ‘tens of thousands’ of apps over private data use
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Washington, D.C.

Facebook says it has suspended “tens of thousands” of apps suspected of misusing private user data amid an investigation that it began last year following the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The social media giant promised in March 2018 to take a look at all of the apps on Facebook that had access to large amounts of user information prior to when it changed its policy in 2014. The resulting suspensions were announced in a blog post on Friday. The investigation began after right-wing political analytics firm Cambridge Analytica improperly mined data from 87 million Facebook users. 
"Our App Developer Investigation is by no means finished. But there is meaningful progress to report so far," Ime Archibong, Facebook's vice president of product partnerships, wrote in the blog post. "To date, this investigation has addressed millions of apps. Of those, tens of thousands have been suspended for a variety of reasons while we continue to investigate."
Facebook said that it initially selected apps for investigation based on their user numbers, as well as how much data they could access from user accounts. It has since broadened that investigation to include apps that it thinks have the potential to abuse its policies, a process that involves both a background investigation of the developer, as well as an analysis of the app’s activity on the platform.
The investigation, Archibong wrote, involved “hundreds of people: Attorneys, external investigators, data scientists, engineers, policy specialists, platform partners, and other teams across the company.” 
While Facebook says that it removed tens of thousands of apps, it notes that the suspended apps, while plentiful, were only created by roughly 400 developers. An app being suspended doesn’t mean that it was necessarily posing a threat to people, and many were still in their testing phase when they were suspended, so they were never readily available to Facebook’s wider user base.
Facebook says it is not unusual for developers to have multiple test apps that never get rolled out. In some cases, apps were suspended because the developer did not respond to a request for information from Facebook, not due to any actual policy violations. One app, myPersonality, apparently shared information with researchers and companies but refused to take part in Facebook's audit -- so it was banned
The post goes on to says that Facebook hasn’t confirmed any other instances of misuse to date other than those it has already revealed to the public and that it has taken legal action against a handful of apps for a number of different reasons.
Beyond the investigation, Facebook says it has “made widespread improvements to how we evaluate and set policies for all developers that build on our platforms.” It also removed a number of APIs and has increased the number of people that work on its investigations team in order to better handle them in the future.

Read more