You may have heard chatter yesterday about alleged plans by the hacker group Anonymous to “kill Facebook” on November 5th of this year — a date made famous by the film “V For Vendetta.” The concerns arose from a video posted to YouTube recently, in which someone purporting to be an Anonymous insider details their intentions.
“Your medium of communication you all so dearly adore will be destroyed,” the video says. “Everything you do on Facebook stays on Facebook regardless of your privacy settings, and deleting your account is impossible. Even if you delete your account, all your information stays on Facebook and can be recovered at any time.”
Here’s the full video in question…
But is this really a thing?
An Anonymous member going by the name of “Speakeasy” explained to Gawker’s Adrian Chen that the whole episode is merely a horrible misunderstanding rooted in a long-aborted plan to try to get people to delete their Facebook accounts in masses on November 5th, a movement deemed, “Operation Facebook.”
The group planned a two-pronged approach: They would 1) urge Facebook users to delete their profiles on November 5th as protest and 2) develop their own, privacy-friendly social networking alternative to Facebook. But in Mid-July Speakeasy and his buddies got bored of Operation Facebook and decided to shut it down. They turned the early code for their social network over to another group, Anonplus, and that, they thought, was that.
But they forgot to clean up after themselves, and the abandoned scraps of Operation Facebook became fodder for rumors of a spectacular attack against Zuckerberg’s baby. See, the Operation Facebook kids had started a crowdsourced document to plan their protest; when they disbanded, everything was deleted from the document except for a single line warning Facebook that it would “never forget” November 5th—the date that had been floated for the mass account deactivation.
The chat room was left, empty except for a link to this cryptic threat. Eventually some Anons stumbled on the empty room and rumors started circulating about Operation Facebook. Speculation ranged from physical attacks on Facebook’s server to some newly-discovered exploit that would bring the site crashing to its knees. Someone made a video about this new, destructive Operation Facebook—Speakeasy says they don’t know who—media outlets picked up the video, which now has more than a million views. Now Facebook is slated to be destroyed by year’s end.
F*cking hacker nerds! Clean up your sh*t, nerds! And run before Mark Zuckerberg sends Ogre after your as$es!
BTW, people in the know have long speculated that Facebook’s platform is vulnerable to attacks, so does anyone else think that Speakeasy is full of crap and they’re actually is a plot to bring down Facebook underway?