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I wonder how many of those accounts are fake / sockpuppet / astroturf / paid likes
by Phlarp 11y ago
I wonder how many of those accounts are fake / sockpuppet / astroturf / paid likes
- austenallred 11y agoAgain, totally guessing here, but I would guess a negligible minority
- speeder 11y agoI had a GF that worked solely to create fake facebook accounts. She alone had about 15 of them, she worked in a company that had about 10 employees that did the same thing as she did. The company that she worked for, was one of the smallest ones, there are several others that are much, much bigger.
- doe88 11y ago> I had a GF that worked solely to create fake facebook accounts. Yes but did she connect to all of them on monday by a mean or another? I think that's the fact it was on a single day that makes this number impressive.
- speeder 11y agoHer fake accounts had as one of the objectives reach 5000 friends (when this happened you could convert it to a page with 5000 followers and sell it to a company). To do this they created a program that searched the internet for pictures of someone in various situations, then prepared a easy-to-use library of photos to be uploaded every "x" period to look like a real person. The account operator (or operators for some particularly prized accounts) would then log-in, post the photo scheduled, and write a post on the fly, the best operators could make the fake account look like a real person, fooling not only other users but bots, tracking software and whatnot. The accounts that looked particularly real were very useful for PR efforts, some of the biggest clients were appliances manufacturers (example of one of them: GE), and one of the uses was for example one day try to distract the public after some bad news about washing machines causing accidents went viral, or try to create a counter-post that is viral too (in the washing machine case it worked, the viral post stopped being viral in 3 or 4 hours, and not even me remember what was the issue with the washing machines).
- lazaroclapp 11y agoAssume the average such company has around 100 employees with 15 fake accounts each, now assume there are 1,000 such companies: that's 1.5 million fake accounts. At this scale, that is "a negligible minority" ;)
- Houshalter 11y agoPresumably they only had 15 fake accounts because they put a lot of work into each account. If some company just optimized for quantity over quality, they could get that number up a lot. And if another company used bots instead of employees, they could easily have tens of millions of fake accounts.
- ovulator 11y agoSo that is 150 in the company. Lets assume there were 100 companies like this, each one 10 times bigger than this smaller company. I'm guessing that is actually overstating the reality. That is 150,000 fake accounts. That would account for about one percent of one percent of these billion logins. So very negligible.
- alanh 11y agoI would like to know more about this. Who is paying for fake activities, and to what ends? Obvious guesses (with prior evidence!) is: Government astroturfing & information gathering (hot girl friends you + gov't gains access to your "private" content), and brand astroturfing.
- T-A 11y agohttp://www.newrepublic.com/article/121551/bot-bubble-click-farms-have-inflated-social-media-currency http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121551/bot-bubble-click-f...
- differentView 11y agoNo one pays me and I had over 20 FB accounts just to play games. A lot of games give you in-game rewards for referring your friends and allow friends to gift each other in-game items. Edit: And most of my friends have two or three real FB accounts, one for close friends, one for older relatives/their parents' friends, and one for work acquaintances/bosses. I am in the minority in only maintaining one real account.
- hellbanner 11y agoCan you elaborate on the company's purpose? advertising?
- speeder 11y agoYes, it was a advertising company. Beside creating false rumours for PR objectives, another use of the accounts was try to reach 5000 people in them (I dunno now, but when she was my GF facebook converted people accounts with 5000 friends into pages with 5000 followers, then ad companies could sell those to kickstart company pages).
- rabbyte 11y agoSince we're all totally guessing here, I feel like I should point out that we're talking about FB scale here. Negligible minority for FB would be many products entire user count.
- austenallred 11y agoRight. 10 million fake accounts is still a negligible amount.
- rabbyte 11y agoWell, it's only negligible within context. Nothing is just automatically negligible at scale but within the context of active users for a single day, I agree, it's negligible.
- user_0001 11y agoI would say you are wrong. For a billion users, they need 1/6 of the worlds population. No way do they have that. How many kids under 7? under 5? in the world. Don't have accounts. How many elderly over 80? 70? don't have accounts. What is the % of non-"developed" countries? Not 1/6 Compared to people running multiple accounts (personal / professional/ seo accounts / spam accounts), now that I have heard of. Regardless, they still have a hell of a lot of users, but 1b real, I doubt
- serve_yay 11y agoDo you guys think this is just somehow not possible, or something? It's Facebook.
- nosuchthing 11y agoIt's Facebook circa 2015 though.
- downandout 11y agoProbably at least 20%. But is 800M any less significant? It's an insane number.
- 0x4a42 11y agoWho care? Even if it was 1 billion bots loging info FB in one day, it would still be massive.
- oxfordbiochron 11y agoIt's probably quite a bit of fake accounts. We did a report on the ad fraud going on and our stats were very high for FB with bots. See Digital Ad Fraud report here. http://oxford-biochron.com/over-88-of-digital-ad-clicks-deemed-fraudulent-new-study-by-oxford-biochronometrics-suggests http://oxford-biochron.com/over-88-of-digital-ad-clicks-deem...