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Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot
- Mc_Big_G 9y agoFuck Facebook. Delete your account. A corporation's singular goal is to maximize profits, by definition. That's exactly what they've done by taking Russian money and using it to influence our elections. If you want justice, it's simple. Delete your account and don't use any Facebook services. Then we need laws regarding political "ads" and the internet, in addition to a lot of other changes our system obviously needs. Facebook will fight change as long as it affect their bottom line.
- briandear 9y agoHilary Clinton spent more on her wardrobe than the Russians spent on Facebook. It was roughly $160k. Hardly enough to influence an election when campaigns spent close to a billion dollars.
- why42 9y agoI can't believe this hasn't been brought up... but there is a massive conflict of interest here. And not due to the slimy but mostly above board reasons posted in the article. It is deep rooted in the financial industry. Misleading investors is not punished if you have a big business. Especially in tech. Facebook stands to lose or gain billions of dollars on market capitalization based on how many people investors perceive to be on Facebook. If Facebook is over-reporting users by any size multiple, they stand to get billions in additional valuation. The people using fake accounts don't want to get caught, as they make money from them. Given the above, how can anyone realistically expect Facebook to really commit to cleaning up fake accounts? This isn't just for Facebook. Big business has proven to be beyond prosecution unless they engage in the most outrageous behavior.
- leggomylibro 9y agoExactly, they have zero incentive to remove fake accounts, and several incentives to keep them. This is all just a show on their part. But I doubt that only 10% of facebook accounts are real.
- devonkim 9y agoOne thing I learned from my experience in security is that sometimes instantly responding to a threat may be counterproductive because you may be reacting to a form of a honeypot - it is used to determine whether their newest iteration would bypass your detection or not. Similarly, large online game operators tend to do bans for bot systems in waves rather than incrementally to avoid signalling precisely what tipped off their systems. I don’t know if the dynamics make sense for Facebook’s adversarial users or not.
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 9y agoAgreed. Even if a given fraudulent account wasn't specifically created to be a honeypot, promptly banning it affords the creator more time to iterate on their method.
- 1024core 9y agoWhat if this "Kevin Eversely" character had actually immigrated from Macedonia to Minneapolis? Just because many of your friends are not from your region, by itself doesn't mean anything.
- twothamendment 9y agoRight - one odd thing alone isn't enough. I worked on a platform that allowed contributors sign up and provide content from their area. A user provided some fishy content with a very heavy slant so I started looking into his profile. The big thing that really confirmed we were on to something was his profile photo was one of a retired athlete. Busted by tineye.com. Once we dug in some more we found it was a local politician writing under a fake name. So yes, having all your friends in another area doesn't mean you are a fake, but it may be an easy thing to look for that flags the account for more inspection.
- lwis 9y agoYet I've contacted them twice about a fake profile which they've refused to remove despite passport and driving license evidence. Does anyone know of a better channel through which to pursue this?
- ProAm 9y agoHonestly who cares if there are fake accounts (as a user). If you are an investor I could possibly see interest, but even then who really cares as long as facebook looks like its big and still growing that's all that matters.
- rb2018 9y agoFacebook can just charge 1$ per sign-up and the problem is gone (faking credit cards etc does not scale). Of course, as others have said, they prefer having more "users".
- dymk 9y agoAre you honestly suggesting that requiring having a credit card is in any way a solution to fake accounts? That's a ridiculous proposition not just for Facebook, but any service that operates in developing areas or serves users under the age of 18.
- fredgrott 9y agoquestion Can any Social Platform claim to police bot accounts when receiving investment money from the same exact forces doing the bot accounts? Seems to me that their is a bigger problem than just the fake accounts..no?
- erjjones 9y agoCrowd source this problem. Add a report fake account option. If so many (x) number of different IP address, etc. report it, sandbox that account. Simple.
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 9y agoThen what happens? If I were the adversary, I would respond by dedicating a fraction of my fake accounts to reporting thousands of random Facebook users. Gum up the system.
- diogenescynic 9y agoThey won’t admit they have a fake account problem because it would admit they been selling ads to bots and ripping off their advertisers. Too bad it’s true.
- thecollate 9y agoI just boosted couple of posts on Facebook. Every single one of them had likes from Bangladeshi click farms. I am not even kidding. Each of the likes had western sounding name with about 30 friends all of who were posting in Bengali language. I am not sure if Silicon Valley show got the idea from Facebook or otherway around.
- glial 9y agoWho would have guessed that the first large-scale achievement re: the Turing Test would have happened on Facebook. We are watching bots be confused with humans and vice versa on an enormous scale.
- craterdude 9y agowill they also be removing U.S. propaganda bots, or just foreign ones?
- ngsekar 9y agomay be
- lostapathy 9y agoA major failing with Facebook's process for reporting accounts is that there is no way to enter any text to help them figure it out. I have seen numerous accounts that are breaking the TOS, but it's only obvious if you know some other bit of easily verifiable information. Without fail, whenever I report one of these accounts facebook tells me "thanks but they're fine, feel free to block them if you still feel this way". Given the limited information available, I can see why they aren't able to kill the account, but the decision would become trivial if they would take even one sentence of information to help explain it.
- ern 9y agoI've been flagging accounts for years, and the quality of decision-making seems to me to have gotten worse recently. I wonder if the push to hire more moderators has lowered the standard.
- oae9043nteo 9y agoThank you for pointing this out! This drives my spouse nuts. I don't have an account myself, but she's flagged things before, and the options are different every time. When they even have the correct option, the result is always exactly as you say - Facebook says it meets community standards no matter how blatantly it's breaking their TOS. It's absolutely insane some of the threatening stuff she's seen that's considered OK. (Luckily none of it directed at her.)
- hyperpape 9y agoNot only that, the reporting process and categories were weird. A few months ago, I got a series of friend requests with similar pictures (a naked woman with the name of some website superimposed). I dutifully reported them, but there was no "spammer" option, and none of the categories really fit. At least one time, I got a response that I could block the user, but no confirmation that they were deleted.
- anigbrowl 9y agoThey don't care anyway. A while back I got a notification that a sexually explicit picture had been removed from my page. I had never seen the picture in question, said so, and asked where it had been posted, as I was worried that my account had been compromised. They completely ignored the question and I got back a standard 'we've reviewed the picture and found it's not compliant with our community standards' reply. Their 'community standards' are also bullshit, of course, since the community of users has exactly zero input into the design of said standards. People can share video of violence and murder freely (though it may need a click-through to view), and I'm OK with that as some imagery can be both violent and newsworthy. But anything sexual is treated as toxic. My wife got banned for a week sharing a photo of a statue in a museum. Like many people, I'd really like to leave the platform but not the network of friends that I communicate regularly with. And no, email and or other channels are not good substitutes. Any alternative has to offer at least the same degree of functionality/convenience to be worth using.
- olivermarks 9y agoFacebook's login page encourages you to set up a new account ('always free') despite their knowing you have an account. Makes me wonder how many sock puppets and variants there are out there. Regarding 'Russia' surely we should be saying 'Eastern European Gangsters?' rather than a nation state...
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoI wonder how much of the problem would be eliminated if Facebook accounts had a 1 time $5.00 set up fee? I'd definitely be willing to pay a 1 time fee for a 90%+ reduction in fake accounts.
- skinnymuch 9y agoBut the vast majority of people wouldn't be happy about that at all. Even if most people ended up paying, the loss FB would take in trust and reputation from users would be catastrophic. Even Whatsapp usually seen as a great startup in their growth and sustainability never charged more than a fraction of their user base the $1 fee.
- cat199 9y agoThat depends - Does Hollywood count as 'eastern european gangsters'? They are probably responsible for every bit as much phony account influence peddling as anyone else..
- tzakrajs 9y agoDo they know for sure who is sitting at the computer?
- cryptoz 9y agoA real shocker for me is how little the big tech companies are using their AI powers for defensive purposes. Each smart-project they undertake to detect your friends in your photos and identify cats in pictures is done for a directly profitable feature. But with Twitter and Facebook both getting caught letting foreign actors buy political ads and use fake personas to influence the population, it seems like an existential risk to them. Wouldn't it be wise to direct some of this work to detecting fake accounts, providing an honest experience to users and being more honest overall? Yeah, Twitter and Facebook would show slower growth numbers. But they would become respectable and sustainable for society, which seems massively more valuable financially in the long run.
- jsnell 9y agoJust how do you know what these companies are using for fighting abuse (fake accounts, spam, account hijacking, etc)? Dealing with abuse is an adversarial process, where both sides are trying to adapt to what the other is doing. It's not like most programming where you can come up with a provably good enough solution. It also means that time is a valuable resource. There's nothing to be gained by e.g. Twitter announcing that they're now using ML on the profile images to detect fake accounts. That'd let the bad guys know right away that they need to change their pattern. Instead what you want is for them to first waste some time before they realize that something is wrong, and then waste more time experimenting on exactly what changed, and then even more time figuring out how to bypass it. So unless you're working on abuse at one of these companies, I don't understand how you can so confidently talk about what they are and aren't doing.
- ravenstine 9y agoCould that be a sign that current AI is not as intellgient as tech blogs suggest?
- tzakrajs 9y agoAnd that AI is a bubble within a bubble?
- dhimes 9y ago
- menacingly 9y agoI get that facebook my have complicated motives here, but I don't know that "easy to spot" is a good yardstick. First, there are the countless instances where something is trivial for a single person to suss out that doesn't scale. Second, and perhaps most importantly, I don't think simple hunches about fake accounts are really actionable here. Having an account that "originated in the Middle East" that now presents as an "attractive woman" is not really a clear-cut case for having your account terminated. I get that we really really want to be able to draw a hard line between people who behave in "weird" ways and organized influence attempts, but I don't think we can get there. It's starting to sound like "bots" and "fake news" have disagreeable opinions baked into the definition.
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- sfifs 9y agothere's no real incentive to work on this unless ad revenue takes a hit. When YouTube ads appearing in front of extremist videos caused brand money to get pulled out, solutions started magically appearing.
- tyingq 9y ago>, but I don't know that "easy to spot" is a good yardstick. Anecdotal, but my dog has had a Facebook account for a decade now. He makes appropriate comments and likes too. His profile picture and stats are accurate. Given that FB can detect faces and assign names to them, I assume they know this account is bullshit. There's got to be some aspects of avoidance of their part. Growth is more important than making sure accounts are real, unless people report it.
- supercanuck 9y agoI think they simply don't have an elegant, technical solution for what amounts to old fashioned "policing" or "investigative" work that they simply refuse to or don't want to do because it probably isn't a priority (until it is). The solution seams akin to the neighbor stealing cable. Send someone out to go look.
- IronWolve 9y agoFacebook and twitter have many criminal organizations cat fishing people for money and black mail. Its larger problem that should be tackled than botnets posting memes. (IMHO)
- rosser 9y agoUnless I missed it in skimming The Fine Article (I have a couple minutes between standup and another meeting, so time constraints), they're overlooking an, IMO, obvious tell. For months now, whenever I've clicked on one of the "trending" stories in the right sidebar, I've seen a wall (not intended) of public posts that are verbatim, to the terrible grammar and obvious non-native English speaker phrasing, copies of one another. If you have a bunch of accounts posting the same string of text, attached to the same link (or even just links that are grouped together topically), maybe those should be subject to further scrutiny as possibly being "fake"?
- Stranger43 9y agoExcept of cause that's also how very real grassroot movement's look especially those not made up of American college students, i.e. you have a fairly high chance of chance of you accidentally targeting a few thousand genuine users. Remembering that almost all of facebooks growth potential is outside of the US. Facebook really cannot afford to just kick off people based on not being us college students. The problem is that while it might be easy to find someone who diverges from what the nytimes think the correct mainstream should be from a beltway centric viewpoint, it's far harder to differentiate between a bot and some yahoo posting her local mainstream view from a netcafe somewhere in Siberia.
- rosser 9y ago> ...you have a fairly high chance of chance of you accidentally targeting a few thousand genuine users. Which is why I said "further scrutiny", and not robo-ban. The tone of these posts is very much, and very consistently the whole "sow dissension" and "poke at wedge issues" shtick that is demonstrably part of how the Russians have been meddling in our shit — and which Facebook, perhaps knowingly, profited from. (Unless you're also suggesting that's somehow part of the "correct... beltway centric" narrative that NYT, &c, "think" we should have, and which is instead some kind of false-flag, psy-ops disinfo campaign — in which case, never mind; please don't waste my time further.) As your sibling comment describes them, they so often have a feel of "Markov chain gibberish", and not just "not being us college students" or "someone who diverges from what the nytimes think the correct mainstream should be". EDIT: Parenthetical.
- jokoon 9y agoBy "policing fake accounts" they also mean "hunt down real accounts who don't use their real name, and ask for a scan of your ID".
- cddotdotslash 9y agoI understand the distinction, but how do we expect them to do both? If they can't enforce a real-name policy (by backing it up with required ID) then how can they possibly remove fake accounts which often use fake names?
- jokoon 9y agoJust watch account behavior, IP addresses... There are many real users who don't use their names for good reasons. Fake accounts are also used for false clicks, which facebook doesn't mind. And by the way, there are no way to really know if a name is real or not. Im just saying facebook use the real name requirement excuse... but there are other ways to fight fake accounts.
- deadmetheny 9y agoIf you don't want to abide by their policies, don't sign up. It's not that hard.
- nnfy 9y agoThat was one of the final straws for me. I don't think anyone should trust Facebook with enough information to completely take over someone's real life identity. FB feels authoritarian in a very Orwellian way, and it is even scarier that, much like Orwell wrote, nobody seems to care. We might not be burning books a la Bradbury, but we seem to be burning away our rights to privacy as a complicit society.
- skinnymuch 9y agoDo you feel the same way about other major institutions like Google and Amazon (they're still getting there)?
- nmstoker 9y agoThis needs care, but I don't see why they can't just rate limit key activity from high risk accounts that are reported, then let the person carry on. If they're genuine then things like friend requests will get accepted but if they're fake, those will get a poor response and seal their fate. Simple: earn trust through good behaviour. And it's not too heavy handed for the false positives.
- jbverschoor 9y agoWell. I've reported dozens of fake accounts. All of them were "REAL" according to FB. I stopped reporting. They can have their fake accounts.