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On the hunt for Facebook’s army of fake likes
- projectramo 10y agoIf fake accounts can be detected, how come they can still win the presidential nomination?
- wernercd 10y agoBecause they paid real competition to not compete and their opposition is a socialist?
- Aelinsaar 10y agoIs this a matter of, "And now they'll change those patterns", or is this something that can be generalized regardless of how the fakes change their posting styles? The last lines of the article suggests to me that the answer is something like: This isn't going to work out in the world, only in the lab.
- tyingq 10y agoThe article mentions that services already exist that are stealthy enough to fly under the radar: "The issue with these methods, however, is that stealthier (and more expensive) like farms — which likely do not rely on fake/compromised accounts — can successfully circumvent them, as a result of spreading likes over longer timespans and liking popular pages to mimic normal users. Our recent preliminary study confirms this hypothesis on accounts used by BoostLikes.com, showing that tools similar to those deployed by Facebook (which rely on graph co-clustering) fail to accurately detect fraud."
- Aelinsaar 10y agoSo in essence, this is just going to slightly alter the landscape in terms of which of these services gets the money and the clients.
- Sarkie 10y agoWould the title of this get flagged?
- dang 10y agoWe reverted the title to the article's because it was neither misleading nor linkbait, and so by the HN guidelines shouldn't have been changed. (The submitted title was "Fake Facebook accounts can be detected by when they post and the vocabulary used".) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Yhippa 10y agoI get one legitimate Facebook friend request for 20 fake ones. Would be nice if Facebook was better at detecting and pruning these people. Same goes for their other product, Instagram. I want people to find my pictures I post on there but the amount of notifications I get not from interactions but from spam accounts adding me and liking my photos is very annoying.
- ayuvar 10y agoIt's a little sad that I use the Instagram report-spam feature often enough that I become aware of subtle changes to its UI over the course of months. I feel bad for whoever has to handle the reports on the other side.
- dimino 10y agoThat's interesting, because I get maybe 1 fake Facebook friend request per year? I think a lot of the problems people have with Facebook are based in how Facebook gets used. If you have 400 friends, you're simply not getting the same experience out of Facebook as a person with 60 friends is getting.
- ktRolster 10y ago>That's interesting, because I get maybe 1 fake Facebook friend request per year? Maybe he does too
- cgriswald 10y ago> That's interesting, because I get maybe 1 fake Facebook friend request per year? I get a few more than that, but the pattern is always the same. Profile picture is of an arguably attractive girl and we have a mutual friend. The mutual friend, in my case, is always one of a few guys who historically hasn't done well with women.
- jeffmould 10y agoI used to get a "fake" friend request a week on average with FB. Someone told me to hide my friends list entirely, meaning that I even my own friends can't see who I am friends with. As soon as I did that, I think I have gotten one or two fake ones in the last year. My only guess is that my friends' accounts are getting hacked and the hackers are just networking through their friends list and friend of friends lists and adding people along the way. As for IG, the amount of spam accounts is almost unbearable. To me it is next to Twitter with the number of accounts. IG I average about 3-4 spam (porn or sell me followers) accounts per day. With Twitter it seems to come in chunks. I'll go a few weeks without any and then one day I will get 50-60 follower notices from obvious spam accounts. With both it makes the user experience unpleasant.
- onion2k 10y agoI looked at 10,000 toy bricks and they were all green so I can say with great confidence that "All toy bricks are green." That's an example inductive reasoning. It's quite flawed as a way of extrapolating from known information in to the unknown because it doesn't account for the things you don't know. In the same way, saying "Fake Facebook accounts post with this frequency or these few words" doesn't work, because it only considers the accounts that do. It can't detect the bots that don't.
- _dark_matter_ 10y agough. Get over yourself. All science is inductive reasoning. Now talking about false positives or false negatives might be a more insightful conversation.
- dang 10y ago> ugh. Get over yourself. Please keep incivility and personal attacks out of HN comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- dimino 10y agoInductive reasoning is how the scientific method works, however. "I've run 10,000 experiments that show toy bricks are green, therefore I can say with great confidence that all toy bricks are green." Knowing things with absolute certainty is super hard.
- kbenson 10y agoThe point is not that you can't trust your results, it's that you can't extrapolate a theory about all toy bricks unless you know you are seeing a representative sample of all bricks. "I've run 10,000 experiments that show toy bricks I found on the ground are green, therefore I can say with great confidence that all toy bricks are green." What about bricks in the toy chest? What if someone was building something green before you tested? As this applies to Facebook's statement, all they can assert is that they've found a way to detect fake Facebook accounts that they've tested against the accounts they've been able to ascertain are fake. What about the fake accounts they could not confirm were fake, or that weren't identified in any way?
- spiznnx 10y agoIs it in Facebook's best interest to find and delete fake accounts? Fake accounts clicking on ads makes Facebook money (maybe not in the long run).
- artemisyna 10y agoI would think yes. If they didn't, why would an advertiser spend money with them, knowing full well that part of it was being thrown away on fakes?
- x3n0ph3n3 10y agoIt could just as easily be said that it's in Facebook's interest to appear to want to find and delete fake accounts. As long as their customers (advertisers) believe click fraud is being addressed, Facebook wins.
- tn13 10y agoIf that were true Google would not have banned fake Adsense clicker. I have experience in FB market and I can tell you that none of us care about Likes. We care about eventual conversion (What % of people called up to know about our product?) which is a very good filter for all fake people.
- aandon 10y agoProduct manager at fraud detection company Simility here. I'm very surprised Facebook hasn't put more effort into curbing fake accounts, makes me think it's very low priority for them. We have social network customers who are much smaller than FB, yet have gotten their fake account rates far below FB's. One effective strategy we've employed not mentioned here is category mapping: if an account of type A, only targets accounts of type B for likes (especially if they ignore categories C, D, etc.), this is usually a high indicator of fraud. For example, one very common strategy is to create a fake account for an attractive female to friend many male accounts (especially relatively new accounts unaware of these tactic). This can be easily detected by analyzing the gender and account age of all targets and coming up with a diversity score. Low diversity score = likely fraudster.
- lazzlazzlazz 10y ago> We have social network customers who are much smaller than FB, yet have gotten their fake account rates far below FB's. The incentive to make fake accounts on Facebook is orders of magnitude greater than almost any other social network. > One effective strategy we've employed not mentioned here is category mapping: if an account of type A, only targets accounts of type B for likes (especially if they ignore categories C, D, etc.), this is usually a high indicator of fraud. For example, one very common strategy is to create a fake account for an attractive female to friend many male accounts (especially relatively new accounts unaware of these tactic). This can be easily detected by analyzing the gender and account age of all targets and coming up with a diversity score. Low diversity score = likely fraudster. Facebook has methods that radically exceed this method in both complexity, precision, and recall.
- aandon 10y ago> The incentive to make fake accounts on Facebook is orders of magnitude greater than almost any other social network. Not true. In the article, the writer pays Russell $15 for 1,000 likes. Being generous and assuming each of Russell's fake accounts can farm out 100 fake likes, he's making $1.50 per fake account before it gets shut down. Compare that to social networks where you can directly extract payments from other members by listing fake items for sale, laundering payments from fake credit cards (on other fake profiles) to yourself, or link-baiting other users. A single successful fake account on those networks can easily net you $100. > Facebook has methods that radically exceed this method in both complexity, precision, and recall. Agreed, and indeed Simility's models have much more complex methods too, but a) I wanted to post an interesting example everyone here would understand and b) I still say Facebook is not using anywhere near its full ability to stop these fake profiles given how rampant this fraud scheme is on their platform. (Again, follow the money, FB has very little incentive to stop these fraudsters who are only inflating their own numbers. It's important to keep them in check, but there's no incentive to waste resources stopping them.)
- Cozumel 10y agoI've paid for fake likes on my FB pages, the reason was no-one liked them when no-one else did, so it was just to get the ball rolling. As far as I could tell they all seemed to be genuine accounts in Turkey.
- pg_is_a_butt 10y agoi have over 100 fake FB accounts... none have ever been detected or deactivated. i don't post anything on them... just use them to log in to stupid things that require facebook integration. i don't have a personal facebook account. you are all idiots.
- shanacarp 10y agoMy stupid question. If i changed the language of my fake accounts in response to this, would they perform better because they now no longer work in your filter?
- peteretep 10y agoAnd yet 50% of my Instagram interactions seem to be spam
- tmaly 10y agogo and read some of the affiliate marketing forums. Instagram is being abused more than you would guess. People are talking about getting a million followers on there etc and selling shutouts. I barely use Instagram anymore, and I enjoy photography.
- rconti 10y agoCan't you just... only follow people you know and like? (other than the ads, of course). I use instagram sporadically, and can't really say I have any problems with the abuse mentioned.
- peteretep 10y agoThe spam takes the form of people commenting generic words on all your posts, and their profiles are full of spam.
- lucasmullens 10y agoI've had to go out of my way to tell several of my friends now that their account is liking spam posts. The worst part is they don't know it's happening, since they don't see posts their account is liking. The posts getting liked are from fan pages with <5 likes, yet the post gets 10,000 likes within minutes. Is there some reason that isn't easily detectable?
- tn13 10y agoFake likes is not a problem as long the Fake v/s Genuine ratio is stable. It automatically gets factored-in in the cost per thousand impressions for marketeers. It is pretty much like emails. If you get 1% CTR to double your conversions you need to send twice the email volume. However if that ratio is not stable then I think it will be a serious problem for marketeers because we would not have any metric to determine how much budget we should scale. This is the reason I suspect FB is going slow on the killing the fake likes. Their strategy will manifest over much longer period than usual.
- dilemma 10y agoFacebook in many ways want to have and benefit from fake accounts and fake engagement. They're not really selling advertising, they're selling KPIs. Facebook is the best platform because they deliver the best KPIs and so get a larger proportion of ad spend. Think about this: Company spends $X on digital branding campaign, then to make sure they can justify it to bosses etc. they spend $Y to get the views to go with the spend. Did customers benefit from or like the campaign? That's besides the point. Companies essentially pay people to watch their videos (AutoPlay in their FB feed).