The Bot Bubble: Click Farms Have Inflated Social Media Currency

Perhaps they are U.S. numbers with support for overseas roaming. Only the carrier would know the final location.

I'm curious how they can do this so cheaply though. Maybe they're using a sketchy carrier that FB could flag for further review.

Why is it a security problem that a U.S. SIM card works in the Philippines?

I think they give "long term sustainable growth" a lot of lip service, but what they're actually focused on is "as much outwardly-seeming growth as can be manufactured via whatever means possible". This is why they're slash-and-burning their way into "developing markets" with projects like internet.org: they're the only parts of the world left that they haven't sucked dry.

>Not really true. Spam accounts degrade the quality of the experience, leading to an eventual collapse of real users.

You say it isn't true, then describe the scenario that is actually happening today, described in this article: a lower quality experience for users and advertisers. The problem exists because of misaligned incentives. Sure, if advertising and users growth plummet due to the problem, Facebook will be forced to do something. But it's happening now and little is being done.

The spam accounts are not new. I worked for a relatively successful gaming company during the social gaming goldrush a few years ago. While doing some research into cheating in our game, we looked at trying to determine players who were using multiple accounts. We figured that close to half of the daily user accounts were fake. Half.

Hell, each of us had multiple accounts ourselves, since we did a lot of testing and market-research, and didn't want to inundate our real-life streams with spammy game updates.

Of course, when the value of your company rests on those DAU figures, no one is going to talk about it. Just report what it says.

> But the fake fans never engaged, depressing each post’s score and leaving it dead on arrival.

Sounds like a business opportunity. Fake fans who actually engage with content. They could even post fake comments and falsely claim they are planning to attend events. What a wonderful future we've built for ourselves.

The harm is coming from Second Floor Music chasing the wrong metric: advertising to get followers as if having more likes was valuable in and of itself. Over the long term, Facebook advertising is only useful if it builds a brand or prompts a direct response. Facebook may opportunistically make money in the short term by taking money from people looking to push up a vanity metric, but presumably they aren't addressing the fake follower problem because paying for followers isn't a sustainable business, or core to how they'll make money over the long run.

That all depends on volumes, I guess. I don't expect them to put an investigator on every report. There are ways and means to get reliable data out of reports.

Example time.

FB get's 10 individual and separate reports for one specific account being fake. Let's assume this is some sort of "spike", and unusual. They then have an investigator manually check this account, and verify if it is a real account or not. If X people report it as fake, then it's likely a fake account, therefore human-intervention is required to confirm.

Then, stage two. After taking action, they note that those 10 individuals who reported this account matched the outcome of the human investigator. We could then infer that those accounts are:

A. Less likely to be fake themselves. And B. More reliable signals of fake accounts.

So, next time around. Perhaps the cumulative, or "enhanced" scoring of those accounts' reports requires a lower threshold for human intervention.

There's a huge mobile phone recycling industry with its center of operations in asia (Hong Kong). Old phones are traded in very large bulks and a lot of these will have their sim cards still in. I believe the buyers take the phones apart and reuse/resell components, where sims are just one type of component tha can be traded.

You might have missed: "scoring of accounts based on some sort of activity profile."

Fake accounts are almost certainly going to have characteristics which distinguish them from legitimate ones, and likely a quantitative, manual, or combined assessment might determine that. Points to consider:

⚫ Photo images. Search for duplicates or analyze for manipulation.

⚫ Correlation with other data sources. Real names, Social Security, marketing, and numerous databases exist which tend to point to more legitimate profiles.

⚫ Direct contact. Set up events, meet-ups, special purchase offers, etc., or otherwise try to elicit direct action. Even statistically differential response rates are useful.

⚫ Social graph. Real people _interact_ with other real people, and there's a web of trust or certification which can be imputed or determined.

⚫ Network profiles. Identifying large numbers of accounts with similar or suspicious profiles _and_ originating from the same or adjacent network addresses (CIDR/BGP block), or from known nonresidential space that's _not_ a generally-used proxy, would be a strong indicator. If proxy use continues to climb, that's going to be less useful (and I suspect this will be the case).

Tests along these or similar lines could be used to generate more general scoring algorithms for identifying suspect accounts.

With a small enough volume, you could do manual inspection. I'm guessing most fake accounts are easy to spot by an actual human, putting an effort into it.

Oh sorry, I misunderstood... Yes that could work, but you'd have to rely on all the big companies using it too. Getting something like Match.com to use it sounds like quite a challenge :)

Or I photoshopped it enough that your filter can't see it is the same and therefore it is now mine (this is easier than you think).

Also images uploaded on Facebook aren't public by default, so tinyeye etc wouldn't have them.