Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
First, there are the countless instances where something is trivial for a single person to suss out that doesn't scale.
Second, and perhaps most importantly, I don't think simple hunches about fake accounts are really actionable here. Having an account that "originated in the Middle East" that now presents as an "attractive woman" is not really a clear-cut case for having your account terminated.
I get that we really really want to be able to draw a hard line between people who behave in "weird" ways and organized influence attempts, but I don't think we can get there. It's starting to sound like "bots" and "fake news" have disagreeable opinions baked into the definition.
I would hate to stand in Zuckerberg’s shoes here. It seems like they will lose this fight, no matter what. The solution might be more political than technical; that is, to teach people to be skeptical and use proper judgement when reading news articles.
But that’s most likely too much to ask.
https://twitter.com/4chan/status/741452104112439296
(joking...)
He could just hire more and better people to do the moderation (or handle appeals). I kinda feel companies like Facebook take the attitude that things aren't worth doing unless they can be automated by an algorithm.
That's about 1/2000th of FB's yearly revenue. They should be able to handle that.
Facebook responded on a couple of such reports but the accounts weren't altered.
If my account had sufficient standing then the action could have been automated. My accounts actions could then be meta-moderated by other accounts that are more trusted.
You make decisions using reports from trusted accounts, and verify them with multiple more-trusted accounts. Verified actions improve an accounts trust level.
Surely Facebook already use such a system? I imagine Google Maps are using such a trust network too?
Use the scale of the system to manage itself.
Facebook could afford a thousand fulltime account reviewers, they just don't want to.
This is an interesting argument to me. It's basically conceding a shittier solution, because we "can't scale" the effective one. As we talk more and more about automation, I think this is similar to what we've seen in meat space with things like tools.
I've heard so many people complain about chinese hammers or socket wrenches (though I also know there are quality chinese tools out there) or many other examples. Things mass produced cheaply are lesser quality, but we're willing to make the trade off as a society because we get things for cheaper.
And now we see this in the information economy. Even though we know a human doing this work would be much more effective, we're not going to do it because the cost is too high.
Eg. Germany passed a law that fines Facebook if they don't comply with German hate speech laws.
I find this line of argument odd when it's about actual natural givens, like dangerous weather. I'm in a house right now, so it's not like technology to limit the effects of dangerous weather is unheard of. And a bit odder when it's about human inventions that have been around for generations, like guns and cars. But when it's used for something basically new in the world? I find it baffling.
Limit total videos per website? How do you determine who gets to stay? Money? Clicks?
Moderating all the videos is hard, but if the videos go to a different platform, they still need that same moderation, right?
Sure, some videos may go to another platform. And for most things, that'd be fine. A lot of videos people post on YouTube are just accidentally hosted there, and would be just as good posted on, e.g., Facebook, Twitter, or another personal account provider. But there's a whole class of garbage that YouTube has because one way or another it allows people to get paid. That garbage is a negative externality on the rest of us, and there's no particular reason for us to allow YouTube to profit from it.
If anything, it's the user's own misuse and mishandling of their own information, and their lack of understanding that anybody can publish anything, that makes their specific use of social media "unsafe". The trust and total integration of Facebook into people's lives is the actual unsafe component, which Facebook themselves actively promote; it all should be held at arm's length.
There is no reason that users should consider random words on random Facebook accounts any differently than words posted on 4chan.
You're right! They're both dangerous. If I posted your public address on both of those websites, how you would you feel about your own safety? Not your Facebook account mind you - just somewhere on Facebook.
That's unsafe speech. Other examples of text where being associated with safety makes sense:
1.) "Hey everybody! Let's kill all type of people who like X tomorrow. Like and share to get the word out!"
2.) "Hey here's the address and personal info of someone I disagree with politically. Let's organize an effort to camp outside their house with guns to scare them. Or lets "SWAT" them.
I am not misusing my information in either of these cases. Instead my information is being misused by others who use the space as an organizing ground. When people ask for Facebook to be regulated, they want hate speech like the above to be removed. People make the argument that this is a slippery slope, but that's a fallacy for a reason. It's trivial to regulate speech of this form on their platforms if they were willing to pay for it, but they aren't. Thus we must force them to regulate this.
You're conflating a regulation of speech one disagrees with, with hate speech. Hate speech is not simply speech I disagree with. It can be clearly defined in many cases (like above), and in the cases where it can't one can simply err towards allowing it.
I'm not calling for regulation, nor labeling anything "hate speech" (ergo not conflating the two, either), so I have no idea where this particular statement of yours is coming from.
What I'm saying is that trusting sites where anybody can post anything is the core danger of the situations instigating this specific mess, and that trust is the fault of the reader, and of Facebook falsely positioning itself as a trustworthy information source.
This situation isn't about "hate speech", incitements to violence, or any other already-illegal acts. To quote, it discusses the "far larger problem, in which the platforms are gamed for profit or political influence." At its core is the observation that people let Facebook content influence their finances and politics; the demonstrable dump of people's unthinking, reactionary blurted opinions, and their personal or incentivized proselytizing/propagandist/marketing skews. These are the random words of random accounts, all unworthy of blind trust.
Facebook wants to discriminate "trustworthy" from "untrustworthy" somehow, and to do so algorithmically. To be very specific, what's at stake here is Facebook's desire to have a particular PR posture as "the" place to be online, for their own gains. There's no actual direct safety issue involved here driving these automated "trustworthiness" speech classifications. It is both unnecessary for the site to function socially, and ultimately unworkable as an implementation from its very concept.
What is necessary for a properly functioning mashup of the world's unfettered speech in one place, is more distrust by the users of what's posted, as there's no reason to trust it in the first place. Again, from a content perspective it's no different from 4chan.
I do actually still disagree with you though:
> At its core is the observation that people let Facebook content influence their finances and politics; the demonstrable dump of people's unthinking, reactionary blurted opinions, and their personal or incentivized proselytizing/propagandist/marketing skews. These are the random words of random accounts, all unworthy of blind trust.
Personally I don't think that people are actually putting blind trust into such sources. Rather, Facebook is instead creating a narrative about how the world is rather than what is truth and what is a lie. I don't think that Facebook is incredibly influential because people put blind faith into it. There's definitely a lot of people who do that, and they're dumb, but I think there's a larger problem at play.
Facebook is able to create a narrative about what "the world" is like. If you're liberal, you see a very different "world" on Facebook than if you're conservative. In this way, I don't think Facebook is influencing the world via trust, but by misconstruing what the world actually looks like. People have the perception that Facebook is an "unbiased" perspective on the world at large and especially your social circle. But we know that Facebook doesn't actually present such a world - it instead gives you a highly "biased" (think more of the statistical version than the political one) perspective on life.
In this way I think it's not necessary to make Facebook the arbitrator of trust on their network, but instead to require them to arbitrate the way information is disseminated.
To say it simpler: It's not a problem that Facebook has fake news, it's a problem that Facebook can create a fake world.
Again sorry for misunderstanding you.
I would further dig into the intentionality of who's creating what. Facebook creates a platform where people can be surrounded by very selective & similar feeds, fed by producers of content seeking to gain traction of their ideas as described in the article (ie seeking sales or political power). To say that Facebook creates these narratives can sound like people at the company are intentionally crafting these narratives, instead of it being a substrate where 3rd parties craft them.
However, let's contrast this with TV, since it also has the creation of narratives and the problem of getting too sucked into it. Different networks have their different slants, people pick their favorites and get wrapped up in the narratives presented there, be they from news or from consistent themes permeating entertainment programming.
But for some reason the response to getting too wrapped up in TV (your fault, watch less or get off it completely) is quite different than the responses to getting too wrapped up in Facebook (regulate Facebook and don't change our habits!). I think the responsibility of the info consumer is the same in either case, and a lot of that is related to how you handle trust vs skepticism regarding these commercial outlets.
If Facebook and Twitter were no more useful or trustworthy than 4chan, then they wouldn't exist. It's like saying, "I can't believe people are trusting encyclopedias and cookbooks. There's no reason that readers should consider them any different than stuff written on a bathroom wall."
The problem is the gap between what they sell themselves as and what the actual user experience is. If Facebook were advertising themselves as the cloaca of the Internet, your vigorous user-blaming would have some merit. But they don't. They aim to be in daily use by every person in the world, a trusted intermediary. They either need to live up to that or quit.
It's all the external feeds wanting your attention & commenters throwing in their 2 bits that are the random noise. This is the domain where the propagandists are working, and where there is no and should be no trust. There's no difference between some nobody posting from their personal account, and some nobody posting from their account that they've slapped a logo on. There's no distinguishable difference between 100 nobodies throwing in their heartfelt opinion, and 100 bots repeating the opinion of 1 nobody.
Your new position is still too extreme; human trust is not binary. We could go another round where I point out exceptions and you come up with another model that is still too simple. And again, and again. Eventually, we might even get to a point where a useful discussion could be had. But it's not my job to force you to think past your taste for dramatic statements. It's yours.
Facebook knows with absolute certainty if an account is legit or not.
Cambridge Analytics, Lexis/Nexus (nee Seisent), ChoicePoint (oops, bought by Lexis/Nexus), Palantir, NSA, and others have all uniquely identitied every person, living or dead.
Facebook has even more data. Facebook even has phantom profiles for people without accounts. Of course they know who's legit. They can't not know.
Just like Facebook juices their ad numbers, they're lying here too.
Frankly, I'm shocked, shocked that Facebook would lie about their culpability here.
--
Twitter might plausibly not know. So they can contract with any of the dozen of 3rd parties that provide demographic databases as a service.
Finally, if they act like real users since they are, it helps Facebook's bottom line. Booting them would hurt FB and piss off those people.
This is just one example of "fake accounts"
I do agree there are likely solutions like you're saying. Pages already work that way. Linked to a personal profile. Multiple can be.
Though I guess it likely isn't in Facebook's interest to do a feature like you propose if they can help it. If they can ban enough actual worthless or hurting fake accounts without messing with fake accounts that are being used legitimately enough. Since that boosts their numbers.
Even if it is a human doing it, it still has to scale to many humans, and there are plenty of examples of things we have never manged to get right due to scale well outside of technological limitations.
Even if you could, my example from the article was one human, with one example case, and as another human I didn't see it as a cut-and-dry bot. Try doing that with 20,000. It's not that it would be "costly", it's that it would be an unavoidable train wreck
Problem is, from what I'm seeing, is that the market bifurcates into "shitty, but cheap" and "OMG, the price, but quality". I want the middle way: "reasonably priced, 'good enough' quality, and won't break the bank". Tools are a prime example. You had Snap-On/Matco/etc., Sears Craftsman, and "stamped steel sockets from China". Snap-On for the pros (and worth every dime if you're a pro), Craftsman for the guy with the '57 Chevy he works on regularly, and then the cheap shit for the person that needs to turn a 13mm nut once a year.
Now we "get things for cheaper", but those things (in the case of tools) are not something I'm going to let anywhere near a fastener I care to ever reuse. Craftsman is gone, so my option is to chase a Snap-On truck around town [0]. I don't need Snap-On quality, it's like buying a $100K CNC machine to turn a table leg when a lathe will do. I just need a decent socket that won't round the fastener.
Seems like the middle fell out of appliances, too. Only in this case, it looks to me like the high-end is shit, too. Every single person I've known that's had a Viking stove or SubZero fridge has had it worked on at least once. I think our Kenmore stove/fridge and LG washer/dryer are disappointingly not built for longevity, but at least nothing has broken after five years. But that washer isn't going to be washing clothes twenty years from now like old Kenmores.
About the only thing I can think of where the quality goes up and the prices down are cars. Man, it is amazing how long a car can go while doing practically nothing for maintenance. And they are much more complex systems, and live in much harsher conditions, than a washer.
To tie this back to the topic at hand, "we can't be bothered to take the time to make it nice" is a fine excuse if only they'd use that as the actual excuse. "Doesn't scale" just means "too much trouble to make it nice, so you'll have to settle with half-assed". If "that's just the way it is", then I don't want "it".
[0] When I bought Snap-On, it was from a truck that drove from auto shop to auto shop, selling tools out of the truck. They had no retail presence; IOW, you couldn't go down to the Snap-On store, it all came off the truck. Not a practical option for the home mechanic, though I've heard they sell online now.
2) With billions of accounts zero examples of error is an absurdity.
3) different communities drastically disagree on which things false positives and false negatives should be defined as.
4) More perceived effort to work on (1) increases the outrage, i.e. the perceived sense of moral betrayal from (1) and (3), despite (2).
5) human editors won't solve (1) + (2), and definitely not (3), and contribute to some degree to (4).
Where? I don't see any more comments from you in this thread...
0 -- The outrage caused by misidentified profiles is larger than the outrage or societal damage caused by the existence of fake profiles.
...which was an unstated assumption underpinning why that entire argument would be an objection to implementing account review, and in my estimation is incredibly incorrect. They're being forced into Senate hearings over the false profiles, constantly being harassed by merchants about possible ad fraud over them, and are losing the trust of their communities. By contrast, the storm in a teacup over a few misidentifications is nothing to Facebook. (There's numerous other unstated, highly subjective assumptions as well.)
I also object to:
1 -- This is true, but irrelevant. Facebook cares about the rates of outrage in communities, not the mere existence. Ironically, this person seems to have fallen into the trap they called out, by thinking Facebook cared about instances of outrage (as the poster would). They also care about the relative outrage -- how mad are people compared to another option we can try. This point very poorly frames the problem as being about trying to stop any outrage instead of trying to minimize outrage.
4 -- This is community specific and untrue of the bulk of people. Decreasing error increases the vitriol involved, but it seems to come from a decreasing number of people as the outrage evaporates in the face of better error rates. So I think they're outright wrong here: it's like water cooling as it evaporates. The water is going away, even though it's cooler in the area.
5 -- This one becomes irrelevant (and/or wrong) if you correct the mistakes in 1 and 4.
Overall, this argument is --
a) irrelevant because even if it was correct, it wouldn't matter as it fails to contextualize its point by comparing levels of outrage between sources
b) wrong internally, in that it's largely irrelevant to the problem at hand or just outright wrong.
And I'm not sure that the total outrage level will ever decrease the more responsibility for moderation they are seen as having.
Anecdotal, but my dog has had a Facebook account for a decade now. He makes appropriate comments and likes too. His profile picture and stats are accurate. Given that FB can detect faces and assign names to them, I assume they know this account is bullshit. There's got to be some aspects of avoidance of their part. Growth is more important than making sure accounts are real, unless people report it.
The solution seams akin to the neighbor stealing cable.
Send someone out to go look.
Without fail, whenever I report one of these accounts facebook tells me "thanks but they're fine, feel free to block them if you still feel this way". Given the limited information available, I can see why they aren't able to kill the account, but the decision would become trivial if they would take even one sentence of information to help explain it.
Their 'community standards' are also bullshit, of course, since the community of users has exactly zero input into the design of said standards. People can share video of violence and murder freely (though it may need a click-through to view), and I'm OK with that as some imagery can be both violent and newsworthy. But anything sexual is treated as toxic. My wife got banned for a week sharing a photo of a statue in a museum.
Like many people, I'd really like to leave the platform but not the network of friends that I communicate regularly with. And no, email and or other channels are not good substitutes. Any alternative has to offer at least the same degree of functionality/convenience to be worth using.
Not picking on you specifically, but I've noticed that this is the standard line used by people who love to complain about how shitty facebook (or sometimes twitter or some other social media site) is, but who don't want to vote with their feet.
I have no accounts and never have, yet magically I have been able to keep in touch with everyone that matters in my life. I don't think I've missed out on anything important, either. Then again, I lived a good portion of my adult life before social media was invented, so maybe I just have some skills that a younger generation never acquired. Or maybe just different expectations.
Seriously, this stuff has existed for just over a decade yet people act as if they can't live without it. It makes me fear for the future health and well-being of society.
It's sometimes the only place people post to let people know they're sick or well, in or out of danger (e.g., in the hurricanes this year), or had a major life event. Sometimes it's impossible to get this information another way without alarming or traumatizing someone, or tying up someone's phone line or draining their battery during an emergency.
I've noticed some small music venues, theaters, etc. use it as their primary place to post events.
About six years ago, I got one very good full-time job that I learned about through a tweet--I wouldn't have thought to even check if that employer had such a job without Twitter. I've since gotten freelance work that I only learned about through Twitter and Facebook. (I've also gotten work through email, Slack, Google Talk, SMS, LinkedIn, physical posters, and word of mouth).
Lots of people use social media to vet potential dates, and see Facebook classifieds (tied to a real identity) as safer than Craigslist, etc.
Facebook, Twitter and all have flaws and things I wish they'd change--so do my phone company, my cable company and the postal service. But using them is a net positive.
I also don't mean to pick on you specifically. Just expanding the discussion.
I also existed before facebook, for quite some time. However I can empathise with those that are dissatisfied with the service and don't see a completely viable alternative, and this doesn't make me fear for the future of our species.
You also negligent to understand that the world isn't static - communication channels move to different platforms. When I was young "texting" took place through AOL's servers. Imagine if a business said "well the web wasn't around when we started so a website must be useless to us."
I've reconnected with childhood friends who have long moved away on Facebook, so have a couple other people I know. That's invaluable.
Without a Facebook you miss out on the one-off things you may say to a group but probably won't call everyone in your address book plus that guy you met at that conference last week, and your old college buddy you haven't seen in 10 years. Most of the time they aren't "important," but they can be, such as "My company is looking to hire for ${position}, is anyone interested?"
Facebook also facilitates getting to know new people so much easier. It's very "low friction" to add someone you "know of but don't know" on Facebook. That can lead to new friendships. Sure, it's not the only way to make friends, that doesn't discount it.
I don’t know if the dynamics make sense for Facebook’s adversarial users or not.
It is deep rooted in the financial industry.
Misleading investors is not punished if you have a big business. Especially in tech.
Facebook stands to lose or gain billions of dollars on market capitalization based on how many people investors perceive to be on Facebook.
If Facebook is over-reporting users by any size multiple, they stand to get billions in additional valuation. The people using fake accounts don't want to get caught, as they make money from them.
Given the above, how can anyone realistically expect Facebook to really commit to cleaning up fake accounts? This isn't just for Facebook.
Big business has proven to be beyond prosecution unless they engage in the most outrageous behavior.
But I doubt that only 10% of facebook accounts are real.
For months now, whenever I've clicked on one of the "trending" stories in the right sidebar, I've seen a wall (not intended) of public posts that are verbatim, to the terrible grammar and obvious non-native English speaker phrasing, copies of one another.
If you have a bunch of accounts posting the same string of text, attached to the same link (or even just links that are grouped together topically), maybe those should be subject to further scrutiny as possibly being "fake"?
Remembering that almost all of facebooks growth potential is outside of the US. Facebook really cannot afford to just kick off people based on not being us college students.
The problem is that while it might be easy to find someone who diverges from what the nytimes think the correct mainstream should be from a beltway centric viewpoint, it's far harder to differentiate between a bot and some yahoo posting her local mainstream view from a netcafe somewhere in Siberia.
Which is why I said "further scrutiny", and not robo-ban.
The tone of these posts is very much, and very consistently the whole "sow dissension" and "poke at wedge issues" shtick that is demonstrably part of how the Russians have been meddling in our shit — and which Facebook, perhaps knowingly, profited from. (Unless you're also suggesting that's somehow part of the "correct... beltway centric" narrative that NYT, &c, "think" we should have, and which is instead some kind of false-flag, psy-ops disinfo campaign — in which case, never mind; please don't waste my time further.)
As your sibling comment describes them, they so often have a feel of "Markov chain gibberish", and not just "not being us college students" or "someone who diverges from what the nytimes think the correct mainstream should be".
EDIT: Parenthetical.
Foreign influence is a reality in every single election, worldwide, to the point where nobody have even accused Russia of doing something that the US would be comfortable making illegal when it comes to US based organizations interacting with foreign nations.
The problem is that the entire debate starts from an obsolete(fake past) view on how interstate relations work in the modern world where the diplomatic corp plays the only major role, where as the reality is that with the modern Internet traditional diplomacy have given way to a much more direct people to people interaction meaning that you cannot just assume that a post being foreign and exposing a viewpoint that's not organic to the beltway are the product of state controlled a botnet, it might be a foreign movement deciding to engage in modern direct diplomacy.
And Facebook cannot grow while remaining an US centric platform so the commercial drive for facebook is to become the facilitator of direct people to people diplomacy rather then a defender of the old diplomatic model as some American politicians obviously want them to be.
And if you cannot use content or "national style" as a guide to spot bots you have to depend almost entirely of metadata about the IP or client involved especially as false positives based on content analysis have a potential for market backlash.
For another example of what I'm talking about, I saw a video a couple of holiday shopping seasons ago, that showed clips from local newscast after local newscast, from dozens of TV stations across the country, all prattling on — verbatim — about how you should "buy yourself a gift this Christmas!" It's a manipulation, that no-one not seeing the broadcasts from multiple markets will ever notice, because they never see another market's telecast.
Obviously, if Facebook can aggregate these posts well enough to present them on a single "trending story" feed, they can damned well perform the step further analysis to check whether they're dropping verbatim posts, and whether there's anything else hinky about the accounts submitting those identical posts. These accounts, if they're fake, are being used to sow disinformation and dissension. They are not dialogue or diplomacy, let alone "direct people to people interaction".
Facebook's "right" to grow in non-US markets is completely orthogonal to that, and also — IMO — way less important than, you know, "a functioning democracy."
EDIT: phrasing.
I am not arguing the problem of money/power being used to amplify speech is not real i am arguing that it's something we have to deal with as a part of how real world democracies works when it's not constrained by an Jacobin state where the media have to abide by a very narrow set of standards for what can be reprinted defined by someone who don't really answers to nobody. And it's sure as hell not limited to Russia.
Fake news and media manipulation really isn't a new problem, Hearst and Pulitzer used to make their living from soving dissent and and anger, and we call those days the golden age of journalism, we have an multi trillion dollar advertising industry that does nothing but manipulate people into doing things/buying things they might not have done otherwise. Not to mention the circus of day to day politics in pretty much every democratic state.
The notion that democracy needed to be protected by a powerful benevolent central committee(with universal authority and no restrictions) is in many way what separated communist from socialists back when the old European empires fell apart, and new systems had to be created, and while the communist states did hold out far better then many democratic socialist states it was not an particularly attractive society for anyone to live in.
We live in a world of 6 billion people most of them in a partially shared economy so for the US to have to live with foreign people interfering in us elections is not anti-democratic it's widening the definition of demos to everyone affected by a election, just as the US public itself reserves the right to try and influence foreign elections.
Let's suppose that you identify just (on FB scale) 10 million likely fake accounts. There are only three options - apply further scrutiny, which would take hundreds of workers and cost lots of money, which isn't worth the (minimal) benefit to FB; robo-ban them which inevitably means false positives and would mean lots and lots of people contesting the ban, and real bot accounts are just as likely to contest than normal users, costing time in manual review; or do nothing unless the account is reported for something horrible, which seems to be the only cost-effective option.
FB feels authoritarian in a very Orwellian way, and it is even scarier that, much like Orwell wrote, nobody seems to care. We might not be burning books a la Bradbury, but we seem to be burning away our rights to privacy as a complicit society.
Unfortunately, google and amazon are a little harder to abandon than fb because of their utility...
I successfully use Bing for 95-99% of my search engine searches. I haven't made the time to get off Gmail. It'll take a while. I don't believe getting off Google is any harder than getting off Facebook for many people. Because if you're not using Google search or Android with Google apps, Google's utility isn't that high for you. Gmail also isn't miles ahead anymore.
Unfortunately I'm so into the Alexa ecosystem I'm nowhere near away from Amazon.
And by the way, there are no way to really know if a name is real or not.
Im just saying facebook use the real name requirement excuse... but there are other ways to fight fake accounts.
Yeah, Twitter and Facebook would show slower growth numbers. But they would become respectable and sustainable for society, which seems massively more valuable financially in the long run.
Maybe the problem is that they don't think this is true. How will it put them out of business? Lawsuits? Government forcing them to pull the plug? People not using the platform because fake stuff is there? I'm not convinced that the end result of any one of these paths will be strong enough to wreck their businesses.
I mean if 20% of all Twitter users are bots that would be detrimental to the sales department. If Twitter knew how many users are bots and did nothing it might be considered a form of fraud and deceiving investors.
Why should I buy ads on a platform that are overpriced if the ads will not be seen by legitimate users?
Now, I can't really answer your question, which was "Why" should you still buy ads on the platforms? I for one don't. But many, many people do. Just like they buy ads on TV knowing a lot of people are going to ffw through them.
They are already in the middle of a very expensive and shackleing threat. It's just playing games to come out less behind (even if that's just going to be increased lobbying).
There's nothing to be gained by e.g. Twitter announcing that they're now using ML on the profile images to detect fake accounts. That'd let the bad guys know right away that they need to change their pattern. Instead what you want is for them to first waste some time before they realize that something is wrong, and then waste more time experimenting on exactly what changed, and then even more time figuring out how to bypass it.
So unless you're working on abuse at one of these companies, I don't understand how you can so confidently talk about what they are and aren't doing.
So yes, having all your friends in another area doesn't mean you are a fake, but it may be an easy thing to look for that flags the account for more inspection.
Simple: earn trust through good behaviour. And it's not too heavy handed for the false positives.
Makes me wonder how many sock puppets and variants there are out there. Regarding 'Russia' surely we should be saying 'Eastern European Gangsters?' rather than a nation state...
They are probably responsible for every bit as much phony account influence peddling as anyone else..
I'd definitely be willing to pay a 1 time fee for a 90%+ reduction in fake accounts.
Even Whatsapp usually seen as a great startup in their growth and sustainability never charged more than a fraction of their user base the $1 fee.
All of them were "REAL" according to FB. I stopped reporting. They can have their fake accounts.
Does anyone know of a better channel through which to pursue this?
Of course, as others have said, they prefer having more "users".
I am not sure if Silicon Valley show got the idea from Facebook or otherway around.
If I were the adversary, I would respond by dedicating a fraction of my fake accounts to reporting thousands of random Facebook users. Gum up the system.