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Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

Facebook can't even handle extremely basic moderation and spam fighting.

For example, I reported a post today that was a blatant attempt to steal my log-in information. Facebook's response: "it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards."

This was for a post that was impersonating Facebook.

I've heard very similar stories from many other people.

Obviously, Facebook just can't handle even the most basic problems to do with moderation. There are so many problems on their platform that go beyond the most obvious attempts at fraud and scams. Yet, if they can't properly handle the most obvious scams, how can we trust them to properly moderate anything at all?

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At 2 am last night a bot impersonating a family member added every one of their friends on facebook & sent them messages. I reported it as a fake account, a ticket which was instantly closed.

Facebook sent a notification later to them that the account was not impersonating anyone, no action would be taken, and there was no way to appeal.

Interestingly, messenger did splat a bunch of pretty good warnings on top of the DM they sent me: https://i.imgur.com/gigUA7G.png

When Facebook talks about "real accounts" they mean only accounts that are not very obviously fake in a way an algorithm can detect. It's unquestionable that it is easy to set up a fake account in FB and it always has been. If they tried harder-- and they almost certainly will have to due to political pressure-- it will still be pretty easy to find more sophisticated ways to fake an account.

With an advertising model there are always going to be incentives to fake accounts, and disincentives to FB to close any account. The simple way to stop fake accounts would be to introduce even a small cost to have an account which would make faking accounts not cost effective. But that's not their model.

Regarding fake accounts, at the beginning of 2021 I saw this story a number of places - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/facebook-disables-1-3-billion.... That in 2020 fb shutdown 1.3 billion (with a b, fake accounts). I can no longer find a good number for the total size of fb's membership. I think around this time I saw it reported as 4 billion. Does anyone have such a number? If the four billion number were accurate, then when this story ran fb was admitting that something like 20-25% of the platform up until then was fake.

a common scam is grabbing someones public profile abd cloning it. i would be shocked if even 1% of those reading this couldn't pull that off in a day. from there you just beed to figure out how to make money from the scam.

Are you kidding me? Of course they can but it's complicated. They don't want to lose money. They don't want to be accused of censorship for moderating. If they "moderate" certain people too much they might bring regulation. Etc.

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