A Facebook glitch recently discovered by some astute computer users shows that climate alarmist Greta Thunberg’s Facebook posts come from her father Svantes Thunberg and “Climate Crisis activist” Adarsh Prathap.
“[A] bug that was live from Thursday evening until Friday morning allowed anyone to easily reveal the accounts running a Page, essentially doxing anyone who posted to one,” Wired reported Friday.
Facebook says the bug was the result of a code update that it pushed Thursday evening. It’s not something most people would have encountered on their own, since it took navigating to a Page, viewing an edit history, and realizing that there shouldn’t be a name and profile picture assigned to edits to exploit it. Still, despite the Friday morning fix, screenshots circulated on 4chan, Imgur, and social media appearing to show the accounts behind the official Facebook Pages of the pseudonymous artist Banksy, Russian president Vladimir Putin, former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, the hacking collective Anonymous, climate activist Greta Thunberg, and rapper Snoop Dogg, among others.
Facebook points out that no information beyond a name and public profile link were available, but that information isn’t supposed to appear in the edit history at all. And for people, say, running anti-regime Pages under a repressive government, making even that much information public is plenty alarming.
The edit history for Greta’s page, Wired wrote, “shows that the content has actually been written by her father, Svante Thunberg, and Adarsh Prathap, a climate activist in India who serves as a delegate at the UN’s Climate Change organization.”
Greta quickly sought to shoot down the reports about her Facebook page.
“Some people have been asking who manages this page. First of all, since last spring I only use Facebook to repost what I write on my Twitter and Instagram accounts,” she wrote.
“Since I have chosen not to be on Facebook personally ( I tried early on but decided it wasn’t for me) I use my father Svantes account to repost content, because you need an account to moderate a Facebook page.” Greta also said that Prathap had founded the official Greta Thunberg Facebook page “long before” she ever knew it existed and that she simply decided to co-manage the page.
“The rest that is shared on Facebook is reposted from Twitter and Instagram by the guy who founded the Greta Thunberg Facebook page long before I knew it existed,” wrote Thunberg. “His name is Adarsh Prathap and he lives in India. Since a lot of people thought it was my official page in the beginning I asked if I could co-manage it and he said yes.”
“All texts posted on my Facebook page has of course been written by me, just like everything else,” the teen claimed.
Said Facebook: “We quickly fixed an issue where someone could see who edited or published a post on behalf of a Page when looking at its edit history,” Facebook responded to the controversy in a statement. “We are grateful to the security researcher who alerted us to this issue.”
