That sounds like a sweeping statement with little forethought when you're talking about a platform that enabled protests in dictatorial regimes.
Step back here: Fake users, sold by the thousands to give credibility and a megaphone to whoever shells out money: bad. Identity verification: A solution with many consequences to be weighed before jumping on the bandwagon.
And dictatures aside, I have no desire to give Twitter my ID or passport.
We don't need a passport or state-issued ID to determine if someone is a real user. That's the laziest solution any tech company has ever come up with, and it's deliberately lazy.
Facebook and Twitter can already tell if you're a human or not, shit Google lets you just click a button to tell them you're a human and then they determine if they believe you or not. All based on info they already have.
We're the best software engineers the world has ever seen on the cusp of an AI revolution... we don't need your passport. We just don't want to find out the truth, so we make it so hard no one will do it.
Best of the best, top of the class is not infallible. It's good enough to sell, because even something as low as 80% accuracy is good enough for things like "Do you want to subscribe to weekly pop tv news", it's not good enough when at the other end you get your account banned.
Google has, on this very site, built up a horrible reputation of using automated processes and having too many users to give those affected by those processes some good recovery. What you're describing is a recipe to replicate that.
99% is not good enough. 99.99% accuracy gets you 0.01% false positives. That's crazy low, right? It's also 100k users when you have 1bn users. Those fancy AI processes are nowhere near that.
I think a lot of their abilities are overstated.
I've met three people in my life who were employed primarily to place ads on the internet. All three were glorified secretarial drones who fell into the position because nobody else wanted to do it.
Any person who knows how to effectively place Internet ads has such high-status skills that they don't have to actually do it.
We^W They may have shitloads of data, but I'm very skeptical we^W they can use this data in any meaningful way. At least, for now.
I don't know what's wrong but despite all that data giant AD companies are supposed to have, I never ever saw any relevant ads, even when I've specifically wanted to see one. Unless I've already bought something - then, sure thing, I'm spammed with more of the same (which is, again absolutely useless - I've already made a purchase).
> We don't need a passport or state-issued ID to determine if someone is a real user.
I don't think we are even capable to come to a consensus what does this mean - to be a "real user".
Am I? What about my alter ego, posting about something I don't feel like publicly associating with (like, porn)? What about a whistle-blowing throwaway account I may create if I learn something fishy? Or what about a "thoughts are my own but went through editorial" corporate representative persona account? And that's just the obvious cases.
I'm increasingly seeing this annoying trend of people hand waving about how a given problem can be solved with data/AI/ML/DL.
- now just imagine the speech was pointed at the bad actors. and that's why this is not as easy as you make it sound.
Maybe some of you are, but people like me read HN too ;-)
Relatedly: if you participate or "observe" any online communities of marginalized people, you may have noticed there are starting to be earnest conversations of whether or not "free speech" is actually more easily wielded to abuse them, than they can use it to have a voice.
Just food for thought. A lot of built-in assumptions are being tested right now.
Let's assume for a second Twitter has a magic wand that, without consequences, automatically deletes fake users used for marketing purposes.
Now what does identity verification actually do for the remainder of the users? In what way does it benefit them? In what ways does it inconvenience them? In what ways does it put them at risk?
Should there be a process in place, that is required of the entire userbase, just to fix the fake user problem? A problem that most users aren't even sort of aware of (otherwise the NYT article wouldn't have been as successful as it was).
We do a lot of reactionary things as a society that follow this exact pattern: Put massive processes in place to remove tiny bits of risk. Governments do that and justify it all the time, cf. the "Terrorism" or "For the children" memes. You often read people's complaints here on the ridiculous security theater that the TSA is, how it doesn't solve anything and inconveniences everyone for something that happens to people less often than winning the lottery.
This, is that. The pattern is: You have a tiny problem, you fix it with something which impacts your entire userbase because you didn't stop to think whether there are more targeted solutions, or even whether it's worth it.
[Note: I argue lower down that AI and statistics aren't the correct fix for this either... gotta keep digging. Maybe the "correct fix" is a mix of identity verification and statistical analysis.]
That exact thing is happening. The Reply All podcast did an excellent piece on the dominant political party in Mexico using armies of people on Twitter - not bots, but people - to drown out news they didn't like, and eventually, to harass people. Show, with full transcript: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/112-the-prophet/
The ability of state actors to use social media to spread propaganda should also be considered in our tally of social media impact. The jury is still out on whether they are a net good.
And there are many people who lack a driver's license and passport. Are they disenfranchised?
What prevents me from using the same id in bot accounts then? Verification implies they have to keep some form of personal identification.
Authentication adds a potential cost-of-reputation to social media content that you post, which in turn may raise the value of the content. If there were a safe, secure way to do it, then why not?
A telling anecdote: A security researcher friend of mine found a somewhat small botnet of twitter accounts (~7000). Reported it to twitter, a few months passed and he noticed twitter hadn't done anything. So he turned it over to a journalist who eventually poked someone at twitter and... poof all 7000+ accounts were gone 6 hours later.
Maybe simply no dedicated people or team for the problem?
I have no idea what credentials I used to create it so I can't delete it, but it still exists (unlike the person it's pretending to be).
You creating a fake college account and forgetting about it probably passes as human enough, there's no concerted effort or agenda to that account besides existing and adding friends at your college.
I think what makes bots and fake accounts generally detectable is consistently pushing certain messages in ways that exceed normal human behavior, as well as showing patterns across many fake accounts.
It's hard to see a pattern in one fake account, but easy to spot it across many.
Twitter doesn't even take them down if you complain about them. Very annoying.
If your profile is public, and they decide to follow it, in part, to make you aware of their existence, perhaps that's a feature not a bug, given that the main use for the thing is to connect with accounts and follow them and discover content.
I want people to follow me because they're interested in what I post, not because they're looking for me to follow them. Perhaps I'm asking too much of the platform, but... it is what it is.
Except that Facebook knows who is real and who fake. Just like my mail provider knows who sends spam and who doesn't.
Facebook can display ads to fake users and still make the campaigner pay for the impression, or make a group pay for reaching more users, fakes included.
Facebook can easily filter requests from fake profiles, so no, fake users do not necessary worsen the experience for real ones.
You say that so definitively. Have you worked on a product with millions of new users a week? It's an extremely hard, constantly shifting problem.
"Facebook can display ads to fake users and still make the campaigner pay for the impression"
Facebook's entire business relies on user and advertise trust. Why would they sacrifice that for some short term growth that would inevitably kill the business by eroding trust?
For starters, encouraging advertisers to spend money to build up an audience with the assumption they could continue reaching that audience much like email, only to throttle organic reach to zero was pretty bad.
There have been other things such as being extremely...generous...with the definitions of how some ad metrics are defined and what defaults are presented. Even as an experienced advertiser who knows to look for those things, the lengths to which some of it it is buried is astounding to the point of it being hard to trust that it wasn't intentional. And the recent lawsuits around such things shows I'm not alone in that feeling.
Facebook has hundreds of engineers and enough data to do match patterns against. Facebook can largely identify who's who.
> Facebook's entire business relies on user and advertise trust. Why would they sacrifice that for some short term growth that would inevitably kill the business by eroding trust?
Yes, the infamous "they trust me, dumb fucks"?
"Yes, the infamous 'they trust me, dumb fucks'?" You didn't do or say stupid things when you were 19? You don't believe in giving second chances, let alone to a teenager?
How many of David Brock's bots have been removed from Twitter?
It seems like it only matters from an investment stance.
Doesn't really work everywhere in the world.
What about my pet open source projects, shall I shut down their account because they don't have a company backing them?
-Upton Sinclair
Twitter’s main strength is its low barrier to entry, for end users and developers alike.
What makes you think Facebook isn't prioritizing this? I'm not questioning whether you're right about this, just curious about what made you draw this conclusion.
"So how many of them are real and how many of them are fake accounts?"
"We work very hard to make sure Facebook is free of fake accounts."
"That's not the answer to my question.".
Disclaimer - I work for facebook.
Someone I am intimate with left Facebook in the last month, in anger at the way senior management up to and including MZ first dismissed the severity of the problem of their platform being used to push propaganda during the election cycle.
And then stonewalled and foot dragged efforts to correct this. By the account I got the only incentive for action has been unflattering attention at the national press level.
This from someone with a personal relationship with Z.
Make of it what you will. The poison is real.
Intelligent and reasonable people can disagree - strongly as to the extent of how much of a problem this is, whether or not it is a problem, or whether the cure is worse then the disease.
This also has little to do with fake user accounts.
I haven't seen a claim that fake users played a large role in spreading propaganda or fake news. As far as I understand it the issue lies in what people were sharing and what Facebook identifies as trending news.
That's a pretty different issue from Twitters fake accounts.
I've seen fake Twitter tweets as well that have bad spelling and other stuff in them that it is obviously a fake tweet made by some website fake tweet generators out there. Then shared on Facebook as an uploaded image. If they don't link to the original tweet on Twitter consider it a fake tweet.