Noynoy Facebook Page Hacked?

Posted on April 28th, 2010. Written by Rico.

Our first automated elections are less than two weeks away. Looks like the competition is heating up; is someone afraid of Noynoy’s dominance on Facebook?

Disclaimer: I am voting for Noynoy Aquino on May 10.

Now that’s out of the way, here’s Techie‘s report on the incident:

We first learned about the incident from Noynoy supporter donut4u when he tweeted, “Noynoy fb page hacked?” An email to the Senator’s camp to verify the defacement got this response:

“Our Official Facebook Fan Page has been hacked, and supporters are maliciously being unsubscribed by the hacker. We are temporarily shutting it down. Rest assured our admins are working 24/7 to restore it to normal operations. Salamat!”

The said statement has since been posted on Noynoy’s Facebook page, which is now up and running once again.

MeNoob.com points out that NoyNoy losing fans on Facebook is an artificial thing, based on the recent love the candidate has experienced on the popular social networking site:

However, the seven months continuous increase of Sen Aquino’s FB fans suddenly spiraled downward after a spike of 25k fans the day before (attributed to a new FB video ad).

The number of FB fans lost in 24 hours is estimated to be around 16,500 fans. Previously, the fan page was averaging around 12k new fans a day and often makes it to PageData’s Top Gainers Leaderboard.

Speculation abounds that the sudden drop of fans was due to a Facebook bug, or an unknown operator exploiting a security hole in the site. Until Team Noynoy hears back from Facebook (the site representatives haven’t replied to the camp’s inquiries as of this writing), we can’t be sure.