Facebook says it will act against 'information operations' using false accounts
reuters.com
reuters.com
Jokes aside - and I'm aware that the FB folks have plenty of good graph theorists - how hard can it be to spot these kind of non-organic actors in the social graph? If I'm paranoid, I would guess that there's probably little distinction between FB's valued corporate customers and advertisers and these 'information operations' in terms of their presence in the social graph.
In any case, it seems like you could do a lot of worthy stuff to distinguish between content that spreads relatively slowly among people who appear to post things judiciously (and might even comment about it in ways that add content) vs various types of bullshit or low-quality content. Again, paranoia suggests that weeding out reflexively transmitted garbage and 'fake news' (for whatever value of 'fake' you're holding today) cuts a bit too close to the business model...
It's a cat and mouse game...and sometimes it makes more sense to watch what the mouse is doing vs trying to catch it :)
I don't do Facebook, never have. But a few months ago I wanted to add login via Facebook to an app I was developing so I signed up for an account in order to get access to the developer stuff. I verified my email address, entered a mobile number, and my account was immediately blocked with a message that I had to send in copies of government id and such. Nope.
My question is, if it's so easy to open new fake accounts why did a legit account opening like mine get blocked?
"Facebook activated my dormant account and it won’t let me deactivate it"
http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/facebook-activated-my...
It's simple really, facepook already collected the so called shadow dossier on you, now they need to attach it to your real identity so that it could be sold to advertisers.
I mean creating a facebook account is getting ridiculously difficult, several hoops to jump in a row and when you manage to do so it hits you with a brick and instablock the account before you even log in asking to send government issued identification with a picture.
Power here is cheap, but getting from point A to point B takes time.
If we could figure out a way for an individual to "waste" time on getting from point A authentication to point B authentication, then we'd have a way to prevent these types of issues from occurring. Or, make them heat up and have to stop to cool down, as it were.
As it stands, identity on the Internet is completely broken, and the idea of a federated Internet is just a twinkle in Google and Jeff Bezos' eyes.
Very hard. Graph theory contains some of the hardest problems in computer science. For example, maybe you want to find the largest group of nodes that are all connected to each other. We don't know how to do this. If the largest clique has n nodes, our best approximation methods can find log(n) of them, which is pretty useless.[1]
Spam detection at FB scale is difficult because with so many users many actual accounts will appear unusual in some way, and of course all data can be faked. Google and Yahoo have worked on this for years, yet spammers can still evade their systems: [2]
> there's probably little distinction between FB's valued corporate customers and advertisers and these 'information operations'
The distinction is pretty clear. FB knows exactly who its advertisers are since they pay FB money to promote their posts. It's true that fake news increases engagement, but FB is tackling an easier problem--identifying active operations making millions of fake accounts.
Sure the clique problem is hard to approximate in arbitrary graphs, but the graphs that appear in social networks are far from arbitrary. And indeed, in such scale free networks the clique problem becomes quasi polynomial or polynomial (http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-35261-4_6...). Approximate solutions are also much easier to find.
On the other hand, the sheer size of Facebook's social graph means that anything other than streaming algorithms or local search is pretty much intractable. That makes solving these kinds of problems into interesting engineering challenges.
It's easy to find suspected bad-actors, but very hard to get it accurate enough to be useful.
The problem is that organic actors are extremely diverse in their behavior, and non-organic actors are usually "human driven" and actively trying to avoid detection.
Graph-based features are useful but to get a useful system you need to combine graph features with other things (temporal behavior, NLP, image analysis etc).
(I work in this area)
Zuckerberg is waking up to how easily manipulable the portion of Americans who voted for Trump are. It's too easy. Just look at the republican response to sb18 in CA. The counseling association was suppossed to be working on an initiative to help but I'm starting to worry.
Meanwhile Obama prosecuted more whistle blowers than any candidate in history after campaigning to protect them. Then dropped 26,000 bombs on Muslims last year.
What about the evidence that came out that the Iraq War's WMDs were a fsbrication of the Bush admin's? Who has gone to jail over that? I personally know Americans murdered in this fabricated war for profit and oil. Even insiders like Greenspan wrote about how that Iraq War was for profit and oil.
The people who are represented are not the working class, productive and honest citizens. You are all too tied up in the Dems vs Repubs debate and other politics to notice this though.
You're saying your own personal denial of this election's results led you to double down on accepting your own personal biases as fact and justify your resulting increased conformity in believing 'what should have happened' onto others whose non-conformity bothered you?
Not a Trumper, but the 'boo hoo' media pity-party in the aftermath of this election has been oh-so delicious to watch after seeing through the level of spin in the last couple of years...
"But we told them to vote for Hillary, and they didn't! What went wrong??? Must be 'facism' and 'russian fake news'! Anything but people actually disagreeing with the moral/philosophical/political position I have absorbed without thinking from MSNBC-Universal-Vivendi funded Saturday Night Live skits!"
But yes, absolutely, the 'conformity' is entirely on the 'right'..
But your comment is shockingly similar to what I've heard from people who still support Trump irl. Do you personally ever talk about what's actually happening in washington, or just stick to this he-said she-said crap?
[1] https://cmgajcjaybookman.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/syriapo...
It's tough to justify this generalization in a world where leftist leaders like Stalin, Castro, Mao, and Chavez are still warm in their graves.
This isn't up for debate. The numbers are both objective and unequivocal.
It was safe to stop believing anything they say after facebook got caught neck deep in wrongdoings and apologized for the first time. IIRC this was circa early 2004 or late 2003 and it's been downhill from there.
First,let me say that I respect Zuckerberg and what he's accomplished. But...
Does middle America care what "the Facebook guy" thinks? This seems like more SV delusion. The guy is literally running Big Brother.
FYI, don't believe anything said by a "lawyer" on facebook. We don't ever start communications that way. Visit the local bar association's website and check the lawyer's real contact info before saying anything.
Which, in cases of fraud or scams, is a fine effort - in the cases of SLAPPs, not so much.
I do like your profile, by the way. It sounds like the lawyer-expert dynamic to me.
No lawyer will send a threat via facebook. And no lawyer will ever demand a payment via bitcoin or gift cards.
So they scam people into "settling" fake litigation. Over Facebook. And many people, who of course don't have much of a clue, fall for it. Amazing. But some of them, frightened and angry, contact your firm.
In some other world, where GnuPG had become widely used, legal communications would be signed, and people could just check signatures. That wouldn't help for fake websites, however.
I think a small lighting bolt on the forehead would look dashing.
> In some cases, they said, the same fake accounts engaged with both sides of an issue "with the apparent intent of increasing tensions between supporters."
Where I come from, we call that trolling :) Sounds just like Usenet.
Why should we take them seriously since they don't acknowledge the fact that the biggest manipulator of social media is the US government itself.
Even google is falling in line, https://streamable.com/uq0d6
Troubling times.
I actually facepalmed at this.
These people know that impression drives reality. They're basically saying "so hey, we found this great slippery slope that looks like a lot of fun!" What the hell?
The grail for algorithms should be to HELP display/persist the disproof of misinformation, objectively and efficiently. Not just to HIDE it and hope it goes away!
Or like, give people control over their own data..
I have ~/.procmailrc - where is my ~/.facebookrc :b
Then you will be no one if you do not have a Facebook account.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-security/making-face...
Given that Facebook now is more or less neccessary to stay in contact with friends and family, it should be regulated like a public communications utility - which means that banning people from communicating with friends and family must not happen, unless that is abused for spamming. Your DSL or phone provider is not allowed to cut your service for anything than abuse, too - so why should Facebook (and also, Twitter and Snapchat!) be excepted?!
s/phone/communication/g
Facebook is right to be incredibly cautious. Imagine getting your gmail or Facebook account shut down because of suspected fraud, and what a huge personal impact that would have on you. Facebook realizes this, and also realizes it is a PR nightmare every time one of those stories makes it onto HN / reddit.
100% for it, I'm always happy to see people freely sacrificing their control in the name of 'convenience' get fucked by that decision :)
The only way for them to integrate with a better society is to learn, really.
You at no point anted up the resources or effort to maintain that data, that was all them. You freely volunteered it to them in the name of 'convenience'; I don't see what part of that arrangement implies they owe you anything once you've finally realized the stupidity of that decision.
Life is not a series of 'okay, I learned my lesson, now please fix it for me' kindergarten tutorials. If it takes a significant loss of data you thought was rightfully yours for you to learn the value of data, then take your lumps and consider it a bargain.
Not that I actually care if FB is successful or not in their venture, and I will be very happy if they go the way of MySpace, but I don't agree with the human cost and PR impact you are talking about.
I stopped using my personal PayPal for this reason.
I think the issue is that unfortunately a lot of internet based companies fail customer management when it comes to edge cases. I see this in the YouTube community relations, Facebook advertising and pages and AWS Help. It can be extremely hard to get edge cases solved by a company that is technology focused.
The customer relations for brick and mortar companies seems more flexible. I think sitting down with a manager at a bank works wonders when there is some strange thing holding up your account.
But yes they have along history of freezing and seizing money and accounts, stay away from paypal.
Turns out gmail has also a reputation for doing this and locking you out of your digital life.
Maybe that way people could at least identify suspicious patterns themselves.
But even without any new data, a third-party could identify troll rings on reddit, youtube, and twitter by scraping the data.
Some pro-democracy group should probably be funding this kind of technical approach. It's likely to be a lot more effective than waiting for all these companies to do it themselves.
I don't think it is as easy to mitigate as you make it seem. Here is a study which details a real-life sock puppet operation tested on Reddit, and the difficulties in detecting it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/38wl43/we_used_sock...
(hint: the US Constitution does not guarantee you a right to use Facebook, or any other private-sector service)
Oh yes, it does - your phone/DSL provider, for example, is not allowed to terminate your service for anything but missed payments and abuse (spamming/hacking). Facebook and other social networks must not be excepted from this!