Anyone looking at the Friendly Spot’s Facebook page this week probably noticed a strange, abrupt shift from posts about drink specials and events to links to stories about oral sex and ass hair.
Which is unfortunately what happens when your social media gets hacked. Jodi Newman, who owns and runs the Southtown icehouse (along with several other drink and food hangs across town) with her husband Steve, says that earlier this week staff noticed they were no longer admins on the business’s Facebook page. The phone on the profile had changed to a San Francisco number, the profile photo had been swapped with an image of a little blue smiling paleta, and the bar was listed as “permanently closed.”
“At first we laughed, because it all seemed so ridiculous,” Newman said. Then Twitter messages started to come in from people claiming to have hacked their page to hold it for ransom. “There have been several messages like that from different people, so of course we have no idea who, if any of them, did it.” The business has contacted Facebook to resolve matters, but evidently that can take some time.
Newman says losing access to your primary way of communicating with customers could be devastating to some small business owners. That’s probably why others have been helping the bar get their message out, at least while the Friendly Spot’s page remains a receptacle of click-bait about Selena Gomez or cheating lovers.
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