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My wife just experienced something that makes me assume Facebook's bot/abuse algorithm is malfunctioning. She just tried to "sell" something for free on Facebo
by shshhdhs 9y ago
My wife just experienced something that makes me assume Facebook's bot/abuse algorithm is malfunctioning.
She just tried to "sell" something for free on Facebook Marketplace. Due to the popularity, she received 100+ messages in a minute -- the notifications were rolling on her phone.
Shortly thereafter, Facebook locked her out of her account for 72 hours and asked her to verify her identity. I guess they thought she was a bot? Which is strange because why would a bot want to receive 100 messages rather than sending them?
- whorleater 9y agoTo phish people. Bots (like on Tinder, dating websites, selling websites, etc) will make the same post to a ton of different groups, and then send the people who message them to phishing links.
- jfoster 9y agoWhy do you think she was flagged as a bot? I think it's more likely she was flagged as a scammer. To receive such a high volume of inquiries suggests something unusual going on. In her case it sounds as innocent as giving away an item that is in high demand, but in many cases a similar pattern might be a deal that's "too good to be true."
- jdalgetty 9y agoOk, so I got locked out of my account last night for 72 hours. I have no idea why. I had to upload an image of myself for their team to verify. I wasn't doing anything odd whatsoever. Still waiting for my account to be reactivated.
- zulln 9y agoYou could use a Facebook bot as CC for a botnet. Such bot would initially receive a lot of messages without necessary send out their own, and also being something Facebook would want to ban.
- jssmith 9y agoUgh, lockout must be pretty frustrating. Receiving one message could be worth as much as sending 1000 messages when valued by conversion to the spam end-goal. It's also a less obvious technique and one that's more difficult to block. Clearly the algorithm is not as precise as it should be, but I'm sure this mechanism is preventing a lot of abuse even though it blocks some normal use.
- da02 9y agoWhat was the product?
- traviscj 9y agoA bit late to this party, but ALL machine learning algorithms are wrong some fraction of the time. It's not malfunctioning, it's a false positive.