Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled | Hacker News Reader

Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

bbc.co.uk

138 pointstooba157 comments

> "During that six-month period, Facebook removed more than three billion fake accounts - more than ever before.

More than seven million "hate speech" posts were removed, also a record high."

Any sense of context here? For example, seven million might be a raw record high, but of how many total posts would be far more telling.

Same for fake accounts. Is that rate up? Down? Was there a time when FB wasn't as vigilant (perhaps to inflate its user base figures)? Is there a smoking gun for the SEC here?

I suspect a significant number of posts removed for "hate speech" could have been people sharing videos/documents related to the Christchurch terrorist attack. It depends on the definition of a post and whether the BBC interpretted Facebook's message correctly. The number 1.5 million gets thrown around a lot [1]. I also heard the value 4 million, but cannot find the source. If that's true, then I imagine the details of other such attacks were also suppressed.

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2019/04/24/facebook-christchurch-vi...

I know family members who will report posts between each other as hate speech when they are fighting and calling each other names.

I wondered about cases like this. I don't think Facebook is well suited to dealing with the social nuances of real-life humans - context matters. Mass false flagging must be an equally difficult problem to deal with.

Not that I make a habit of it, but sometimes something really annoys me on Facebook, but there's rarely an option that explains the actual problem. For example the other day I got a friend request from some young woman which I didn't accept (but left the request there encase it turned out to somebody who didn't look like their profile). A few days later the request turns into a young Indian looking man. I think most people can agree that bate and switch is bad behaviour for a social media network, but I couldn't find an option to report it using their limited interface.

And sometimes you see something that is an obvious scam/spam, and you figure it will get reviewed faster if labelled “hate speech”.

Just like needing technical support, so you call sales instead.

Or when you say you’re going to cancel just so you “unlock” the retention deals.

Such is the MBA league game of modern life.

Looks as though body counts are back. Not an encouraging sign for getting this mess cleaned up. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_count

What do you mean exactly?

> More than seven million "hate speech" posts were removed, also a record high.

This is an example of a statistic designed to show progress without offering insight into the underlying problem, which is the insidious effect social networks have had on civil discourse. Absolute numbers are of little help in judging whether Facebook is actually addressing that issue in a meaningful way. It seems plausible that the main motivation for numbers like these is to fend off legislation to force social networks to take more responsibility for content, which would undermine Facebook's business model.

It's not all that different from the US military using body count numbers as part of propaganda to support continued funding for the Vietnam war. Here's a better reference to the controversy associated with those efforts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_body_count_controv...

They didn't catch the 3 fake profiles I set up on Facebook. I've not used them for five or more years, but I checked recently and they are still there and still let me log in without so much as a "where you been". They all have obviously fake names and were used only for testing advertising at various times in the past.

I have hundreds of fake facebook profiles, because back in ~2005 or so when my university got facebook, I realized that our email accounts received all mail going to not only myaccount@myschool.edu but also myaccount@*.myschool.edu. Facebook, on the other hand, only confirmed if you were allowed to register based on suffix matching(it was limited to certain schools at that time), but otherwise treated your full email address as your ID. If bug bounties existed back then I would have certainly turned it in, but instead I just used it as a tool to entertain friends by posting comments as other people. Most of those accounts are based on memes from back then, or minor celebrity musicians myself and my friends were in to, but to this day, every account I try still works.

I’ve heard there’s some extra value for EBay accounts before a certain year.

Probably because they just didn’t collect/verify enough data back then to be confident enough to make a decision.

They did, however, "catch" my Instagram account, which was only used by a human (me).

Since posting is not possible without installing the app, I never posted anything, but I did have a profile picture, followed accounts, and commented on posts.

Then, one day, I tried to log in, and it was gone. Email address not recognized in password reset. No trace of any kind.

So long, Instagram.

Same for me recently. Now that Instagram IS Facebook, maybe Facebook doesn't make a difference between fake Instagram accounts and fake Facebook accounts in the report ?

I have both fake Facebook accounts and Instagram accounts (like 3 or 5), and Instagram deactivated a recent account I created for "suspicious activities". I only liked one picture of an actual person and sent one private message with that account... Meanwhile, my other 4 Instagram accounts and Facebook accounts are fine, even if I sent and liked total garbage

> Since posting is not possible without installing the app, I never posted anything

You can post from eg desktop Chrome, without using the app. I routinely do this since I don't like installing FB apps on my phone. I often edit photos on my desktop prior to uploading, so it's just plain convenient.

Sign in on the desktop with Chrome. Go to your default home page (the person body icon). Right mouse click -> inspect page.

At the top, change the page to responsive, and set something like eg 680x680 as the dimensions for the page (you can drag resize to different dimensions). Now reload the page. It will present the standard mobile interface bar at the bottom of the page, including the ability to upload images (the plus icon within a box).

Would resizing the window smaller do the same?

Haven't tested but moving to resposive might trigger a user agent change.

Can the same be done on FF?

Firefox has a mode where you can choose from a dropdown of phone/tablet types, and it will set your user agent and screen size appropriately. I believe it's called "Responsive Design Mode."

That worked, thanks.

Dev tools > Responsive Design Mode in the top right, then back on the main page, selected a phone model. I had to reload the page for it to show the phone version of the site.

Thanks for this insight. I will keep in mind if I ever decide to bother with Instagram again.

Oh so that's what happened to the Instagram account I created for one of my apps. It was completely gone without trace while I was on vacation, didn't even use it actively.

If this happens to my FirstName+LastName accounts I’ve staked out, I’ll be pissed.

My guess is that they label every account with a lifetime customer value number, and if the costs of your database entry is more than that, they cull it for “being a bot”.

Bots wouldn't exist if they didn't generate engagement, and engagement is the currency of Facebook.

So if the bot-detection algorithm works by lifetime customer value, it would cull real accounts and leave the bots alone.

Use the opposite algorithm: cull by lifetime value descending. Gets the bots and the viral celebrities!

(I know it's untenable, but I'd honestly love to see what the equivalent of https://millionshort.com/ for Twitter or YouTube would be like, where the top million contributors and all shares/comments about them were hidden. What would be "hot"? High-value niche-interest stuff?)

My cat still has her account. Granted, she’s not posting political bullshit or trolling. In fact she hasn’t even logged in for something like five years, but she obviously didn’t setup the account herself.

Dunno about yours, but my cat has been known to spend all day on the keyboard and drain my laptop’s battery while I’m away for the day.

I’d ask my dog to friend her but my dog doesn’t like cats very much.

Why would Facebook care if you haven't posted or even logged in for so long?

I never knew how many fake profiles exist on facebook until I tried to buy a $10 amazon gift card with paypal in one of the groups I was joined. I missed all the red flags. First, the profile was an attractive female with little account activity. Second, when I tried to send the paypal payment it defaulted to PHP currency (Philippines money) even though the seller said they lived in the United States. Third, the account was non-us unverified. Then when the person actually did scam me, they immediately deleted the profile.

Needless to say, that was the last time I trusted random people on facebook.

What was this scam?

There are groups (on Discord, Facebook) where people sell Amazon gift card codes for less than the value of the gift card. Sometimes they are real codes that have been bought with accounts that have been hacked through email phishing, and sometimes they are completely fake.

Yup, buddy had his amazon account banned for using such cards. His gf, who orders 10 things a day from there, and shared the account, was not impressed.

Just curious have you tried this before with success or heard about a friend trying this?

Was the deal extremely good 90% off or more reasonable 20/30%?

In the months prior to the Google+ shutdown, I took several pulls of the full listing of Communities on the site via sitemaps files. Though not the same level of detail as profiles, this produced interesting results.

The total net number of communities was increasing by about 1 percent per month (80,000 communites added). At the same time, about four thousand communities per day were being removed (unavailable when queried in the 24 hours following the sitemaps pull), or 120,000/mo. Total (gross, not net) new community creation rate was quite high: 200,000/mo.

This continued until new community creation was disabled in February 2019, in advance of the site shutdown. Total communities numbered over 8.1 million at final count.

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/13767351

A pretty considerable level of churn.

The actual report:

https://transparency.facebook.com/community-standards-enforc...

Fake accounts are estimated to represent 5% of all monthly active users.

So ... most of those 3B were throw-aways?

Another important excerpt:

"The majority of these accounts were caught within minutes of registration, before they became a part of our monthly active user (MAU) population."

For MUA, recent news said "Facebook now serves 2.37 billion monthly active users". And 5% of that is "only" 120 million.

I wonder how I make my inactive account look fake so they will cull it properly...

Maybe start posting affiliate links to mackeeper.com or adultfriendfinder.com in random groups.

I’m sure if you posted porn you’d get banned pretty fast.

Your public profile would, but not the data collection and utilisation attached to it. Shadow profiles are often more detailed than 'real' ones.

Start a campaign to quit Facebook collectively, and they'll ban you. A first step could be to change your profile picture into a "quit facebook" icon.

Any proof this works?

Does asking Facebook to delete your account only work in Europe? Perhaps use a VPN if not?

To what degree are advertisers aware that the profiles which see their ads may not be genuine users?

I suspect they either don't know, or have no alternatives.

Do fake profiles 'see' ads? They don't artificially browse around the site, to create impressions, or do they?

But doesn't FB use the existence of said profiles as a lure for advertisers? (eg. Your ad could reach any of our 1B members...)

Seems like a class-action lawsuit in the making.

It's no secret that Facebook is battling bots. Do you have anything to back up your assertion that Facebook is deliberately lying to advertisers?

It is well known in sv that most if not all social media companies keep inflated numbers for investors, annother for sales and marketing, and a thrid for internal/technical use. I would like to see any evidince that this does not happen. As it stands, your claim is the one that needs to be backed up.

You're asserting that X is happening, so the burden of proof is on you.

However, I think the lack of any forementioned lawsuits is strong evidence that the situation is at least a little more nuanced.

If an internet commentor came up with the idea for a lawsuit with all of 5 minutes of thought, then I promise you that the teams of lawyers that the advertisers employ have also already thought of that, and Facebook's lawyers have also already thought of that and have made sure to limit illegal behavior.

Facebook is not stupid enough to tell a bald faced lie to advertisers and hope that nobody finds out. I would be confident in saying that Facebook has very specific metrics that they present. They aren't going to shrug their shoulders and say "eh, we have about X users". They be careful to say something like "we serve X requests per day" or "we have X numbers of engagements from people". They will make specific and factually correct statements. Those statements may very well be crafted to mislead people, but Facebook has every incentive to make sure they are not actually lying. It's not like they are starved for people buying ad space.

In general, I think it's pretty arogant and ignorant to claim you have a perfect understanding of a situation that you have no actual insight into. It is always safe to assume that there are better informed people who have thought a lot more about any given issue than you have.

They know, it is measured with some degree of accuracy by the platforms, but nobody wants to remove those numbers from their marketing, except the person paying for the ad..

Advertisers simply don´t know. The reason most of them don´t know is because there are virtually no tools available that can distinguish between a real user and a fake user. Only FB can make that assessment with some degree of certainty and even that can´t be trusted. External partners have been given a choice: either advertise at the risk of it being some garbage traffic, or not advertise at all. And for obvious reasons, the latter is what people choose to do.

> either advertise at the risk of it being some garbage traffic, or not advertise at all. And for obvious reasons, the latter is what people choose to do.

Do you mean "the former"? 'Cause, you know, there are still ads.

yes sorry, I had a brain fart when I wrote that!

I haven't got a Facebook account. If I did set one up it would probably be with a fake identity. I've sometimes been tempted because it would help with signing up in lots of other places. But Facebook (or Gavin as the Swype on my phone keeps calling it!) would probably figure out who I was anyway. And the thought of that creeps me out.

Holy moly! I thought FB only had that many users to begin with. When FB announces user counts I assume they include bots to bolster the numbers and only a few years back the number was ~1 billion??

You might be confusing their reported numbers with total inactive accounts. They regularly report their Monthly Active Users which have been >1B recently.

I was confused in the same way and thought the 2B+ accounts figure usually reported was total accounts.

So how many accounts, active or inactive, bots or humans, are there in total?

Don’t think they publicly reveal this as I’m not sure it’s relevant or important to investors/advertisers.

It is very relevant. It just looks very bad when you see the actual numbers.

MAUs were 2.38 billion as of March 31, 2019, an increase of 8% year-over-year.

https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

Well fortunately they didn't catch my account. And I'm happy they didn't. My fake account allows me to:

1. Login to websites that I don't want to share my actual contacts to but just my real name (my fake account has my real name and my real account a fake-ish name so that I can't be Googled too easily).

2. Disable that annoying wall by not having a lot of friends.

3. Be part of meaningful groups (only 1 so far), because my friends know that I have this fake account with a real name.

4. Amazing account for demo purposes when I was working at a coding school.

5. My fake account is setup on auto login on my primary browser, so if I type "fa" and press enter, I feel bored by the empty wall and very tiny friends list, instead of engaged. My main account is auto-logged in to messenger, so that's where I go now.

I'd be betting that they are going after huge blocks of fake accounts that they can link together somehow. Someone like you with a single fake account, they'll live with. They probably know that's so and so's other account. He likes to use that one on his PC. ;-)

I bet Facebook links your fake account to your real account internally and you count as 1 MAU in their stats.

The CNN interview that aired today with some FB exec on this issue was such a cringe-worthy disaster. Could not answer why they made the decision to delete these profiles but would not delete a fake video of Pelosi slowed down meant to make her look drunk or stupid. It was wild.

Did fb refund all of the ad money spend on these accounts? Let me guess: No.

0.02% of content viewed is terrorist propaganda or child sexual abuse. Multiply that by 100 pieces of content per day, and 365 days per year and you get 7 pieces of terrorist propaganda and child sex abuse per year. I wonder how focused it is on specific individuals or if it’s broadly random. I also wonder if rates of terrorist propaganda are much higher among individuals the propaganda is trying to target.

Edit: that is, the base rate of 2 / 10000 pieces of content being terrorist propaganda is perhaps 0 / 10000 for 99% of users and 200 / 10000 for 1% of users.

Facebook has laughably weak moderation.

Twitter, despite having stricter moderation (which seldom seems to result in consequences), seems to have an even bigger problem. An election in a certain country (I'm wary of even mentioning the name of that country, lest I be bombarded) exposed a huge army of dubious accounts shutting down dissent.

In another country, a network of Twitter bots attempted to start a race war.

Then there are the 100k+ follower accounts that seem to get away with blatant incitement and rule-breaking, and Twitter is too afraid of a backlash to shut them down, even when they admit to having multiple admins (something that should disqualify them from the blue checkmark).

WhatsApp seems to be an even more pernicious vector of viral garbage...why it doesn't disable forwarding entirely (or forwarding to groups) remains a mystery.

It isn't an SV phenomenon: in another recent election, WeChat was used to spread fake electoral propaganda.

It may be time, for the sake of democracy, and stability in the world to "de-platform" the platforms entirely. The other option would be for remorseful founders to allow them to be swamped with spam (it might provide plausible deniability to shareholders), and be killed off that way.

Moderation is an extremely hard problem to deal with well. Have you ever attempted to manage a community?

There are over two billion people on there. How about paying their users for finding and reporting content? A reputation system to find and pay trustworthy people to clean up. Thereby delegating the task back to the scale where it belongs, some money and incentives too.

How do you decide who to trust?

I've been thinking about a online bounty hunter service to do exactly this.

Next step - how to prevent Sybil accounts created by the bounty hunters from generating new mal-content on an industrial scale for bounty hunters to identify for reward.

That's true, but FB is not a "community" -- its a global mass mob consiting of billions of people. Even thinking about trying to moderate something at that scale is ridiculously impossible and disengenuous.

I think to this person's point, though – managing something like an online community is a microcosm of what social media platforms deal with, and if you've done it before you know how hard it can be to set the boundaries of acceptable behavior without finding yourself in spot that is viewed as hypocritical.

I can't think of anything harder than that to scale.

"Move fast and break things" is all well and good until you build something so big, so pervasive, and so dangerous that you can't fix it without turning it off completely.

During the recent Australian election there were a number of Facebook advertisements by political figures which were completely false e.g. Labor party imposing a death tax. And given that the election result was pretty close it could've easily have made a difference.

So I couldn't care less whether Facebook culled 3 billion profiles or not. What I need is for Facebook to make the hard choice and stop allowing political advertising on their platform. It's almost single handedly undermining democracy around the world.

Even if it is banned, how on earth are you going to enforce it in any meaningful way? Truth, lies, boots, World...

Same way you enforce any other rule. Same way they already enforce the rules they have?

I hope you weren't hoping for an argument about slippery slopes. And yes, of course that means they may have to hire more moderators and of course that means more expenses. Who ever said Facebook should get away with no moderation just because they're successful?

I mean what's to prevent me putting up ads that I say aren't political, but are? By the time they've been reported and taken down it's already too late?

In your case just use the same approach as spam.

Ask all users to report political advertising. If it reaches a certain threshold take down the ad. Manually review it. If it is political then ban the user, payment method and IP address.

If it's hyper-targeted political ads to folks who you can tell via their profiles will absolutely agree with you, what is their incentive to hit that report button?

Not to blow this up too much, but honestly, these aren't ads for shoe polish or a scammy mobile game or some other bullshit. These are ads that make people feel valuable. These are ads that make people feel like their thoughts and opinions, and therefore their entire being is validated.

I've seen many of these ads. Mostly they are scare campaigns.

And in the US it maybe a case that they are targeting their base voters. But in other countries with compulsory voting they are targeting swing voters. And those people absolutely will hit the report button.

Simple really.

1) Ban any political figure who buys a political ad. If you set an example others will follow.

2) Facebook/Twitter/etc already have a verification mechanism and so anyone who isn't verified and using words like tax, election, vote etc can be sent to a moderation queue.

>anyone who isn't verified and using words like tax, election, vote etc can be sent to a moderation queue

chuckle

Do you propose that in earnest in order to save the democracy[1]? Or are you being ironic and it's simply lost on me...?

What other words would you put on the moderation graylist? "Death penalty", "whistleblower", "sexual assault", "guns", "public education", "welfare", "war", "weapons of mass destruction"? Let's top it up with "conspiracy theory" and "fake news", just to max out the irony meter.

[1] or the republic, where applicable

No I am quite serious.

Send any ads with politically charged words to a moderation queue where someone reviews the ad. And if it takes weeks to review it then so be it. The status quo is simply not acceptable.

He's talking about ads, not regular posts.

Even without political advertising, the amount of fake news spread in Groups in the form of memes and images is absolutely fracking staggering.

If you go through the facebook feed of a conservative facebook user in their 50s+, you quite literally will see all lies and propaganda, and nothing real (for one ex: see the horribly faked Nancy Pelosi video that spread like wildfire yesterday, despite it's obvious fakeness). I'm not being hyperbolic, it's literally all "fake news". It's a completely shocking problem to have but the current state of politics is that there are a lot of people whose media diet consists of mainly of fake facebook group posts.

There is no viable solution either. If you democratize the printing press/mass media so far that every single person can print whatever they want whenever they want to, you will get this race to the bottom where absolute bullshit beats out hard truths every time. Lies getting around the world before the truth is out the door and all that. (Also the reality that this is clickbait x 1000, it's not a business picking articles that drive revenue, it's bad political actors picking stories that drive unrest).

Facebook isn't salvageable. It's destroying democracy around the world and there is nothing that can be done to fix it. I see not just correlation but causation between the rise of facebook and the rise of the fake news fueled far-right that is destroying modern democracy around the world.

(And it's no surprise that with each declassified DoJ report, we learn of yet-another-nation-state running these fake news groups with the explicit intention to subvert democracy and increase civil unrest).

Please delete Facebook before it's too late.

Do you think any other platforms are doing better, or is all social media inherently doomed?

To me, it's Pandora's Box. It's an information singularity. We have political information anarchy. Anyone can do a hack job on a video and get 100,000,000 views and a Presidential tweet and control a news cycle. People are afraid of "Deep fakes" but the reality is is that people are so conditioned towards accepting faked information that "shallow" (lol) fakes are already extremely effective.

It's not "social media" which is doomed, but it's our systems of government. China does just fine with controlled social media that is heavily censored precisely as the government wishes. It's not social media which is doomed, it's democracy, because authoritarians can exert power and control.

It reminds me of the Paradox of Tolerance. [1]

So long as social networks (and we as a society) tolerance this anti-intellectualism and choose fake news over real news, real information can never flourish.

But what can you do? Pass laws (which explicitly violate our American 1st Amendment)? Wait on Facebook to fix one of their biggest engagement (read: profit) drivers? Or just let everything come crashing down and shrug?

Who knows. The answer is aggressive moderation and banning fake news. Recreating the culture of intellectualism and truth. Emphasizing critical thinking. But I am extremely pessimistic that anything will (or even can) be done.

We're in meme-fueled political quicksand. I don't want to sound defeatist, but maybe after a generation or two passes and the millenials are older, this type of information warfare won't be nearly as effective [2]. Until then... good luck.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

[2] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586 ("We also find a strong age effect, which persists after controlling for partisanship and ideology: On average, users over 65 shared nearly seven times as many articles from fake news domains as the youngest age group.")

This has been freaking me out lately. I am trying to form a model of how a society would typically evolve past this situation and continue to advance and spread while maintaining humane and truly representative systems of government. So far I haven't come up with anything good.

But it is a singularity. We don't know what is on the other side. Or if there even is another side.

We are stumbling backwards into a world where a real video of a politician committing a crime in a private setting is indistinguishable from a fake one, but a citizen is 100% liable for actions captured on a government-sanctioned CCTV camera and cryptographically signed with a secret key.

I think it would be interesting to start a company around the idea of creating a certificate authority and system for provisioning and securely storing keys on a hardware level in order to sign and verify "unmodified" footage.

This would need to work both online and offline and thus require a form of device-unique secure enclave.

Offline is 2 layers of verification, your own keys and the on-device keys. Online is 3 layers of verification, those 2 keys plus a one-time key provided ad-hoc by a certificate server.

This means that users could maintain higher journalistic integrity with a video captured while online, as it could be argued that even if the device key is compromised the server-issued key would still provide some level of trust that the video is undoctored.

If this sounds of interest to anyone, get in touch.

> I think it would be interesting to start a company around the idea of creating a certificate authority and system for provisioning and securely storing keys on a hardware level in order to sign and verify "unmodified" footage.

This is also described in (if I remember correctly) "The player of games" where videos were widely known as impossible to trust due to how easy it is to make fakes, but AI entities could testify that they received the realtime, live feed if you needed a proof.

Great idea way ahead of its time (1988)

The idea of compelling an AI to testify in court is fascinating. I wonder if there could eventually be a civil case about this.

Full email address in profile?

Yep, just gotta pass the robot test.

Your backwards email doesn't work yo

Thank you for bringing that to my attention... small oversight on my part. Just recently switched providers.

It should work now.

> To me, it's Pandora's Box.

That is an apt description. In the myth, Pandora closed the box after the horrors had escaped onto the world but while hope was still in there.

So... according to Pandora's tale, we live in a world where everything is terrible. And hopeless.

A favorite format on Reddit is for the entire submission to be a screenshot of tweet text (just the text), or tweet text caption and an image or article headline, possibly with no visible link to the source, not even a link to the tweet. Something you can just create in MS Paint.

And 10k comments taking it for face value, getting riled up over a screenshot of some text. Often when you google the headline, you either can't find it or it's on some bullshit website. Or you read the article and the tweet text everyone is replying to is 100% bullshit like any other clickbait.

It's not just Facebook.

This all sounds like a necessary outcome to how and why these things were designed.

Social media exists to give you that little shot of happiness.

What makes you feel happier than seeing that the whole world agrees with you (in the case of facebook full of bullshit and reddit's oh-so-happy circlejerk over nonsense)?

This is exactly what these platforms were designed to do. All of them. Hell, look at HN for example. Look at the echo chamber that the Assange article is turning into, with dissenting opinions being downvoted for some reason.

It's all of them. All of them. Every of the social media. I feel like there's something in there about human nature, but psychology and sociology aren't my specialty.

Yes, let's go back to when only the press could lie.

Press can be made accountable for what it reports to a large extent, outright lies can be called out and the newspaper or whoever signs the byline can be sued in extreme cases.

An anonymous fake news article has no risk or accountability for its author, that's the main difference.

When was the last time a journalist lost their jobs for printing blatantly false information?

When was the last time a major journalist printed blatantly false information?

It happens regularly.

https://money.cnn.com/2017/06/26/media/cnn-announcement-retr...

https://www.foxnews.com/us/reporter-resigns-after-false-twee...

These were on the first page of results when I duckducko'ed (duckduckwent?) "journalist resigned false"

yes, please. that's better than now.

With press, at least everyone is reading the same lies. Hyper-targeted fake news makes it impossible to discuss anything, because across groups, everyone has their own set of "facts", making people talk past each other.

Yes, because there's only one TV channel and one newspaper.

For any given news story, there are usually few "traditional" sources covering it, with only a fraction of them being widely popular. It's a manageable amount. Social media has switched the way people consume news (and content in general) - they're no longer consumed on per-source basis, but on per-story basis. I.e. most people don't read a particular news site, they read whatever stories from whatever sources happen to be on their Reddit or Facebook feed.

It's not enough to delete Facebook. In fact, if your own feed isn't full of fake news then it doesn't help. You have to get other people, especially those you aren't already in contact with, to delete it too.

> bad political actors picking stories that drive unrest

Unfortunately this has been endemic in the British press for as long as I have been around. The latest round is cherry-picked anti-trans articles. It's not just a social media problem.

It was much easier to avoid though.

Busses on the Moon was the preserve of the Sunday Sport.

The Daily Heil or Sun reliably gave anti-trans, anti-EU - always anti-something, and hard right sympathy of the "we hate the NF/BNP, but immigrants should stop..." variety, occasionally far more blatant.

Most knew what they were avoiding, as well as what they were choosing from their daily.

Now thanks to facebook illegal political advertising and fringe groups like Britain First - who Facebook took years to ban - have gained a voice that reaches a very wide audience, where everyone appears as credible as everyone else if they can play the social media game.

Until it was eventually generally known what they were, Britain First stuff was shared by all sorts of people whose main failing was believing a story or meme someone shared - because it came from someone they knew.

We either expect everyone to be deeply untrusting and cynical of their friends and family all the time - which they're not and cannot be. Or we require some standards of Facebook, finally.

While I am definitely not a facebook fan, I think the problem lies somewhere else. Its a "dont shoot the messenger" problem. In my book, the problem is that people tend to believe shit. It doesnt really matter if the 50+ person got their fake news from facebook or from some other corner of the web. The issue is that people who are clearly not intelligent enought o tell fake news are eligible to vote.

>> If you go through the facebook feed of a conservative facebook user in their 50s+, you quite literally will see all lies and propaganda,

There are no lies or fake memes for the left?

The person you're responding to didn't say that.

I'll go out on a limb and say this though: right-focused news organizations have conditioned the US conservative base to believe highly editorialized articles that aren't fact-based (wether or not the actual assertions of the articles are true or not). I believe that style has seeped into other news outlets as well, but those right-leaning news sources have a head start and at this point their audience is more susceptible.

Maybe in a few years the difference will be negligible, but right now it's not.

I didn't say that, but in order to prevent a "whatabout" or "false equivalence" attack, I will state up front: Conservatives are more likely to create, spread and fall for fake news than liberals.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586

"Conservatives were more likely to share articles from fake news domains, which in 2016 were largely pro-Trump in orientation, than liberals or moderates"

We can speculate as to why. In my opinion, anti-intellectualism is far more virulent on the right than left. Nearly every single left-leaning politician is pro-science and accepts the scientific consensus on a broad range of issues. Conversely, most conservative politicians are anti-science, reject scientific consensus on a broad array of subjects, and consistently parrot mythology in its place. In fact it has become extremely common for conservatives to dislike and distrust higher education, academia, and research all together. It is a common trope in conservative media to attack scientific research as "pointless" and "expensive" and to use religious leaders to discuss intellectual or scientific topics.

Any ideology which preaches anti-intellectualism and mythology over science, evidence, etc, is necessarily more vulnerable to being co-opted in other evidenceless subjects.

There is plenty of anti-science thinking in certain camps of the left as well.

Phone radiation, GMOs, nuclear power, dietary trends, mushrooms are conscious, the list of foo is pretty long if you look. Along with the anti-math, anti-logic, anti-historical evidence view of economics.

But I don't disagree there is a fair amount of right wing kookage spread about. Perhaps more than it's left wing counterpart.

For a long time I didn't really believe the "right wing" fake news thing was real. I'd never actually seen it. Then I visited my father in law who breathlessly informed us at dinner Obama was going to jail as they had proved his birth certificate was fake! Curious I looked at his facebook feed and almost fell over, it was almost all fake news right wing straight out of a parallel universe and really obviously nonsense for the most part. I don't know where he even found that stuff. So ya, it does happen. And I say that as a person who is very much not a leftist (nor a facebook user).

For whatever it's worth, I like to think of myself as a member of the "do what makes sense party". But we have few members and no groundswell and no formal organization it appears. Sadly.

Being anti-nuclear doesn’t mean you’re anti-science, nor does questioning the value/cost/results of GMO foods.

Indeed not, but I think maybe that's the point. There are lots of cases where you can disagree with the scientific consensus without being "anti-science", whatever that means.

Basically all scientific or logical analysis about power generation yields a pro-nuclear conclusion and thus anti-nuclear campaigners tend to make arguments about priorities rather than claim their opponents are anti-science; they argue the risks are underestimated, the costs of waste are too high etc.

As for GMO foods, again, the scientific consensus is there are no health problems with them, which is why the anti-GMO argument tends to be of the form "but what if they're just so super long term problems that we haven't seen them yet" (a.k.a. the EU's precautionary principle on blocking GMO foods from competing with EU farmers).

Look at it the other way around - lots of climate change skeptics make deeply scientific arguments, typically pointing out errors or mistakes in papers, cases of previous predictions that turned out to be false and so on. That doesn't make them anti-science, it arguably makes them campaigners for better science.

> Basically all scientific or logical analysis about power generation yields a pro-nuclear conclusion

What's the scientific analysis that says power plants have on average cost a metric fuck ton more to clean up than was ever expected or planned for, or that there is still no effective plan to get rid of the waste they produce?

See this is my point. I can admit that some scientists are no doubt pro-nuclear, and pro-GMO.

But you apparently can't admit that there are scientists who don't believe one or both of those things is net positive.

Remember that fossil fuel burning power plants also generate a ton of waste and nobody has a realistic plan to clean that up either (beyond CO2 extraction or geo-engineering, neither of which are more plausible than nuclear waste containment).

It's easy to argue nuclear power sucks when compared to a theoretical ideal. When compared to forms of power that dump their problematic waste into the atmosphere where it's nearly impossible to get back, having the nasty stuff conveniently packed into cylinders, ready for dropping into the continental shelf, doesn't seem like such a bad deal.

> when compared to a theoretical ideal.

Renewable energy is not theoretical.

> nasty stuff conveniently packed into cylinders, ready for dropping into the continental shelf

Your plan for highly radioactive waste is to put it in canisters and drop them into the ocean.. sure, what could possibly go wrong?

I think you are being terribly naive, sorry. From the study you just linked to:

> Posts containing links to external websites are cross-referenced against lists of fake news publishers built by journalists and academics

Have you seen opinion polls of these two professions? They are overwhelmingly, and I mean more than 90% left-voting. Conservative academics have published a long list of stories about how they have been made unwelcome or pushed out. There are virtually no conservatives in academic or journalist circles these days.

So all your study shows is that if you ask a bunch of Democrats to make a list of "fake news" sites, they list out a lot of pro-Trump conservative outlets. What a shock. Anyone could have told you that - this isn't science and doesn't deserve a paper, it's just bog standard political mud-flinging posing as science.

This is the exact sort of behaviour that's driving a wedge between people: biased academics use the vague aura and automatic defence to science that they've inherited from prior generations to make absurd claims. Journalists who came straight from college and who retain an automatic deference to professors repeat whatever they say as "findings", conservatives who double check discover scientific fraud and call it out, then liberals go in for the double smear of claiming their opponents are anti-intellectual!

Speaking now as a foreigner watching from abroad, over the last few years I've watched as what looked like the entire American left descended down a crazy conspiracy theory of Trump being a Russian spy or collaborator. We now know that isn't true. How many millions or billions of Facebook posts must have been shared about the whole Mueller investigation, about the idea that Trump and Russia are connected in some way? And yet it's all false, it was a fiction invented by the media to get clicks and ratings. Stories collapsed left and right, even left-leaning journalists like Greenwald and Taibbi have since come out flaming the journalistic establishment because so many of the stories turned out to be false, and yet the left seem to collectively fall for it in a huge way.

So I am very skeptical about your thesis that there's a big difference in people's susceptibility to fake news, or how intellectual they are. You should be especially self reflective give you just cited a supposedly scientific study that makes extraordinary claims about voter intelligence yet is transparently nonsense - it's literally "we asked a bunch of Democrats to pick websites they disagree with, labelled them as fake news, and discovered Trump supporters share lots of fake news". You should learn from the conservatives and trust academia a bit less!

Fake news is the symptom. The disease is confirmation bias.

The internet, and particularly social media, has become the most efficient and effective confirmation bias machine ever. People gladly (read: voluntarily) crawl into their self-fulfilling echo chamber and instantly become the master of their own universe. They get to believe whatever it is they want to believe. No assumption too strange. No "belief fetish" too bizarre.

I'm not sure what the answer is (aside from a mass education in critical thinking and self-awareness), but I do know that deleting FB is a balloon grab. That is, the disease will simply manifest itself somewhere else sooner or later.

>mass education in critical thinking and self-awareness

Does not fix confirmation bias, because people who are in deep in their own little holes don't want to know

No argument from me. I was being over the top. We're not going to mass educate critical thinking, too many other paper tigers would fall,that's for sure. It's also difficult to scale it and get it to stick.

That said, I still think it's important to keep in mind that fake news is a symptom. Get that context wrong and any potential solutions are simply shooting at the wrong target.

> We're not going to mass educate critical thinking, too many other paper tigers would fall,that's for sure. It's also difficult to scale it and get it to stick.

The bigger problem is that confirmation bias is an evolutionarily useful adaptation. Good luck fighting those.

> Fake news is the symptom. The disease is confirmation bias.

When your root-cause analysis turns up an intractable problem that can't be solved, then maybe turn the intractable problem against itself.

Instead of eliminating filter bubbles and confirmation bias, encourage them. Herd the haters, trolls and propagandists into their own subgroups and shadow-ban them so people outside the group can't see them.

It doesn't solve the problem of confirmation bias, but it might help contain it and prevent wider contamination.

"conservative facebook user in their 50s+"

I have two additional theories for why the boomers are more prone to spreading fake news.

Maturity

Every person, demographic adopting a new media has to go through the whole maturity cycle anew. We've all been there. (For me it was CompuServe, BIX, FidoNet.) We've always had trolls, memes, jokes etc. So netiquette and its predecessors emerge. It takes a while for the novelty to wear off, cooler heads to prevail.

Entertainment Becomes Reality

Boomers are bored. One article I read quoted a few boomer trolls who regarded fake news as funny, a way to pass the time. No different than the supermarket tabloids.

Alas.

Like when the AOL noob tsunami flooded the web, obliterating the indigenous culture, there's a huge cohort of boomers adopting Facebook. Fed and supported by boomerbots, of course, they're having an outsized impact.

More sadly, I fear most boomers are no longer teachable, more so as they age. So they're not likely to adapt or develop their own netiquette. I've all but stopped talking politics with my older relatives. Because they have no memory of prior discussions. Just like Groundhog Day.

Lastly, how we talk changes how we think. Propaganda works. This is more than confirmation bias feedback loops (mentioned elsewhere). This is something like brainwashing. My mom's boyfriend got her watching Fox News and cable news. She's transmuted from educated, progressive, liberated powerful woman (earned a masters degree, marched in DC to support abortion rights) to almost complete dittohead. This "captured by a cult" story is sadly common.

The only remedy I can think of is turn off their TVs, log them off facebook. Keep them distracted with knitting, puppies, and church.

My elders are now basically shut ins. Plugged into the TV. They'll happily watch happy shows, like Antique Roadshow, nature shows, cooking.

But when the nontoxic programming ends, they go back to the default channels of Fox News, CNN, and manufactured outrage.

I tried to figure out how to reprogram their TVs, cable boxes to exclude the toxic stuff.

But what's needed is an eldercare streaming TV apps. Like parental controls, but for our parents instead of our kids.

The whole fake news / conspiracy stuff gets me.

I find conspiracy theories to be almost like some sort of sci-fi / fantasy lore.

I love watching stuff like Ancient Aliens, I know it is complete nonsense but it is fun laughing at all the begging the question they do.

My other half believes in some super natural stuff such as horoscopes etc and she gets a bit annoyed at me and my brother taking the mickey out of it but that is about as far as the "harm" goes with most of this stuff.

Trying to stop people believing in crazy things just isn't possible and actively trying to suppress it online will just make it worse.

As someone who enjoys coast to coast AM, I get the entertainment value; but there is real danger and harm in a lot of it. Just look at the harm Alex "turn the frogs gay" Jones has caused, specifically to the parents of Sandy Hook victims.

Although you are right in that actively suppressing it can make it worse, since that very easily can be spun into "I'm right, the globalists are out to get me and are censoring me because I'm speaking the truth". Perhaps the best thing to do is laugh it down, but after 2016 somehow it's all gotten less funny.

Alex Jones is a meme. Everyone knows he is a nutcase.

As for danger, the mainstream media is just as bad. In the UK we are having people Milkshaked, including veterans.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9144116/ex-paras-turn-up-to-gu...

Because some publications has deemed the likes Nigel Farage to be a "fascist". So saying that Alex Jones is worse than anyone else is crazy. Just watch CNN and their conspiracy theories about Trump, they do the same but they are never mentioned because they are deemed to be "on the right side" whatever that is.

> There is no viable solution either.

There is a solution: make a cost to post. In the past it cost real money to propagate your ideas, so your audience was limited. The only way to get money was to be rich or to be popular enough for people to pay for your newspaper/magazine/mailing list. The internet lets anyone have a language-wide reach for free. I guess one should expect that in this situation the messages that will dominate are the people that have an incentive to shout loudly, which is what we seem to have.

Ok, but if you make it pay-per-post than only those with money can post, which is a different kind of problem but still a problem nonetheless.

> e.g. Labor party imposing a death tax.

This was advertised on Australian radio before the elections by other parties too, so it's not exclusive to Facebook.

(Source : Started listening to Gold 104.3 FM streamed because Christian O'Connell moved there and we missed his breakfast show!)

Facebook shouldn't handle political advertising any differently than any other private media outlet like a newspaper or cable TV channel. And what is "political advertising"? Are issue advocacy ads political?

its an interesting proposition. maybe it would also help remove the need for some of the money that goes into politics.

WSJ article from yesterday: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ends-commissions-for-p...

> In the wake of revelations about Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election, senior leaders at the company debated whether it should cease running political ads entirely, former employees familiar with the discussions said. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg made the final call to stay in the business, though changes will be made to how it operates, one former employee said.

This is a joke. The punchline is everybody's fake on social media.

true, doesn't make it any better though.

"Facebook removed more than three billion fake accounts - more than ever before."

Oy. How do you justify letting this issue fester that long / to that degree? How is that not an unprecedented mea culpa?

Edit: I'll risk the HN "downvoting not discussed mantra" for this. BILLIONS of active fake accounts is a core competency failure, full stop. World population is single digit billions...give me a break.

What’s the difference between a dual account and a fake account? Is it activism? Is it when the accounts are bought and sold, is it politics?

A dual account (eg a business/personal) on Facebook gives you a store to work with while maintaining both business and personal identity separation (to some degree.)

Facebook could be ~100% accurate at separating real and fake accounts if they exchanged data with the government to make sure that every user had a passport / social security number / other equivalent associated with their account. Is that the world we want to live in?

Some countries already do that - China, obviously. UK wants you to upload your ID when visiting a porn site (think of the children!). Japan has ID requirements for certain types of websites.

And of course, both Google / Youtube and Facebook have had a real name policy in place for a long time, to much objections. I've gotten a popup from Facebook asking me if the name of a friend who intentionally uses a fake name on Facebook to try and avoid her stalker is correct.

That's not the point and it's not even related to the discussion. I'm not sure why you are trying to bring in Big Brother nonsense.

The fact of the matter is that there are only 7 billion people on earth, and Facebook had a whopping 3 billion fake accounts. So how did they let it hit 0.5, 1,2 and 3 billion fakes before doing something? Surely with all their algorithms and AI/ML/Data Scientists they could have intervened sooner, but they didn't.

This is only for the last six months. They aren't letting the issue fester, but rather there are enough bad actors out there to try 3 billion times to create fake accounts. They are probably deleting 1000s of accounts per day that they detect to be fake

3 billion in 6 months isn't "1000s...per day". It's ~17 million per day, all caught only after the fact.

I stand by my characterization of "festered".

That would only be 100% accurate if the government approved ID was perfectly secure, and no one ever leaked databases of those personal details. Tens of millions of passport and social security numbers are already out in the wild.

How to make it secure? Estonian and Scandinavian countries have chip on them that a computer can read, but it's for doing gov and banking stuff. You can always fake a photo, they don't have much to compare it against to. At some point FB started to verify profiles actively, I didn't use my own name or took part of any political/marketing mumbo jumbo, but I quickly photoshopped an id with the fake name using a sample ID as a blueprint and the human moderator left me alone.

There is no "the government". Many countries don't have a central population registry, or at least not an accurate one. And refugees often have no valid identifying documents.

How do you justify letting this issue fester that long / to that degree?

The article reports that Facebook said they "... spotted and deleted a majority of them within minutes, before they had any opportunity to "cause harm"." That would imply they're not letting the fake accounts fester but the scale of the problem is just absolutely huge.

Facebook = AOL + geocities. Long live Search.

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