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Several times over the last few years social media posts have appeared claiming that users who followed instructions to like and share could win myriad prizes in a purported giveaway sponsored by Oprah Winfrey and/or Tyler Perry: As we have noted on previous pages about similar hoaxes, a number of red flags about these posts are evident, primarily that the underlying pages are not endorsed by any official channel associated with Oprah or Tyler Perry, and that the specifics of the giveaway changes, as does the bait: The aim of schemes like the Oprah and Tyler Perry hoaxes are typically to rapidly build a large Facebook following in order to sell pages with high like counts to third parties. While the hoaxes appear to present little risk to participants, liking and sharing the false information is not entirely safe; in addition to advancing the interests of and encouraging social media scammers, page likes potentially enable user data mining by scammers. The liked pages also often change, leaving names and identities unwittingly endorsing a scam, hate page, or other undesirable activity. The 2017 recirculation of the Oprah/Tyler Perry posts coincided with Facebook's announcement it would be downranking engagement bait in users' News Feeds.
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