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Fake “like” factories – how we reverse engineered facebooks user IDs [video]

626 points by sturza 7y ago

tnolet 7y ago
Very curious about what Facebook's response is to this (outside the response mentioned in the talk, which is clearly not sufficient) Also, if there are any FB employees on here, what do they think of their employer still enabling massive disinformation, astroturfing etc? To be clear, I'm not blaming individual employees. Just honestly curious how they deal with these issues on their personal moral compass.
- abrodersen 7y ago
  I'm assuming the ones in denial will say something like "It's up to the individual to evaluate the quality of the content e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶w̶e̶ ̶e̶n̶g̶i̶n̶e̶e̶r̶ ̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶p̶l̶a̶t̶f̶o̶r̶m̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶g̶e̶n̶e̶r̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶i̶n̶s̶t̶a̶n̶t̶a̶n̶e̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶e̶m̶o̶t̶i̶o̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶r̶e̶s̶p̶o̶n̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶m̶a̶x̶i̶m̶i̶z̶e̶ ̶e̶n̶g̶a̶g̶e̶m̶e̶n̶t̶."
- dwnvoted2hell 7y ago
  How can you have a moral compass when all you do is use your platform to make as much money as humanly possible year after year? We've seen this in Facebook. We've seen this in China. And we've seen this same problem with Alphabet - why would you want to be screwed by more than one letter?
- netfl0 7y ago
  Any thoughts on alternative approach they could use--what would it look like etc? Would there be any undesirable consequences of a different approach?
  - tnolet 7y ago
    Approach to what? User registration? Tracking fake accounts?
    - netfl0 7y ago
      > Very curious about what Facebook's response is to this (outside the response mentioned in the talk, which is clearly not sufficient) i.e. what would be sufficient in your view?
      - tnolet 7y ago
        Gotcha. Well, I'm not really sure. Maybe just making likes private or banning likes (as suggested in the talk). Or banning political advertising completely (see the part in the talk on political parties in Germany buying likes). Or something that completely destroys meddling and fraud and is observable by the public. The "we are working on it behind the scenes"-response is just not sufficient in my view.
      - zo1 7y ago
        You could go down the route of what Slashdot did back in the day. "Likes" were something you could only give out after getting them. So you merely passed them along (like money in a market, sorta). And getting those likes was difficult and hard to game. It was a sort of "pay it forward" system with random batches of "likes" being seeded into the community based on some sort of measurable behavior, after which the community would recycle it internally based on the like being a token of "reward". Whereas with current social media. Likes are given to users with out any care other than "hey you seem to be a valid user, let's allow you to generate large amounts of likes".
- asdernr 7y ago
  Are you seriously this naive? No matter what they will think. Facebook pays their rent... So working there and standing up agains the Zucc as a small employee is pointless.
  - kranner 7y ago
    That's what throwaway accounts are for.
  - imgabe 7y ago
    For a lot of employees, Facebook pays enough that paying your rent should not be an issue after a couple of years working there if you're in any way financially responsible.
  - reroute1 7y ago
    ok... but this is kind of a problem that Facebook wants to fix also, so where is the conflict with "Zucc" ?
- ethbro 7y ago
  That's kind of like asking how Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn feel about intelligence services tapping internet traffic. Not very useful. A more cogent question would be "For anyone in Facebook working on this problem, do you feel like sufficient organizational resources are being spent combating it? Is there low hanging fruit, or are we into the whack-a-mole stage of any popular platform with a financial incentive to cheat?"
  - Fordec 7y ago
    I don't know, I would like to hear Vint Cerf do a talk on intelligence services. Particularly if the second half of the topic is spitballing solutions.
    - LinuxBender 7y ago
      There are videos of him talking about the inception of the internet. In fact, he explains in detail how we wanted to be able to have mobile military units that could relay data back to HQ real time in enemy territory and that was why ARPA created the internet. I don't want to misquote him, but essentially he said something to the effect of it isn't like you can ask your enemy to set up a network for you just prior to invasion
      - rhizome 7y ago
        Vint ain't never been the Freedom Rider, he's the cop (so to speak).
  - daliusd 7y ago
    If you are developer try using https://github.com/instagrambot/instabot https://github.com/instagrambot/instabot (Instagram is part of Facebook). You will be blocked quite fast. For research and fun I did things more sophisticated than instabot and still got blocked. So Facebook as company is researching this area and is actively using whatever is possible. I'm pretty sure they will get much better in the future. In the end they want companies to buy ads and if competition gives better result than they do, they will lose.
- janpot 7y ago
  what do you think about the oversea slavery that made your clothes and your phone? to be clear, I'm not blaming you as an individual, just honestly curious about your moral compass.
- piokoch 7y ago
  Frankly I don't understand this kind of "calls to action" directed to company X employeese. First of all, it is not like FB employees are pushing people into gas chambers in Dachau, FB usage is not obligatory, what I keep telling everyone who complains about FB censorship or privacy abuse - I don't have FB account because of that. In the same way we might ask to step out Coca Cola employees (say, delivery truck drivers), because drinking Coke is bad for ones health. Or HSBC employees because HSBC was laundering narco cartels money? Or John Deere employees because company forbids farmers to modify tractor software? All of those practices are immoral and bad, but why chase the weakest, whose income, ability to pay rent, etc. depends on the employer? Why not target those, who are really responsible for that what is happening and who make huge money thanks to that? I would say it makes much more sense to vote with our money, avoid services and products from companies we consider immoral. Publicly discourage people from using such services and products, publicly stand against CEOs, shareholders of those companies, spread the knowledge about their personal responsibility for such kind of behavior - this is not that difficult and actually can make a difference. Imagine PR outcome of a conference that would invite Mark Zuckerberg, but no one else would want to attend it? Mark shows up on, say, TED, and all the people leave the room during his talk? In the media-driven World surely this would become "viral" and even Mark with all his money couldn't ignore that easily.
  - hydgv 7y ago
    >FB usage is not obligatory, what I keep telling everyone who complains about FB censorship or privacy abuse - I don't have FB account because of that. Wow are you saying that people should take responsibility for their actions and should let others choose freely what to do?
    - asdf21 7y ago
      Sounds like privilege. /s
    - jen20 7y ago
      Shadow profiles, anyone? The idea that Facebook does not attempt to spy on former or non-users is laughable.
- ryacko 7y ago
  If Facebook were to defeat astroturfing, all advertising firms would just promote their new social media network on all the major news networks. Our economy is founded upon mutual relationships of grift and greed, even if Zuckerberg were to disagree with his own platform, he would not be able to change it.
- cjslep 7y ago
  This kind of poisonous invitation to grandstand might as well be grandstanding in and of itself, and all of these performative paper ethics makes me want to puke.
- brnt 7y ago
  What is surprising is your assumption Facebook isn't aware of this. Nay, that Facebook was not designed for this very purpose. Facebook, who employs some of the top data analysts and AI specialists, actively building tooling on the cutting edge of those fields, who's funded primarily by commercial use of its platform, with the for-pay 'reach' being the most obvious monetization scheme. I don't see how you could be missing that everything about Facebook incentivizes nonsense such as like-factories.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Every time yet another scandal comes out of Facebook, Google, etc... I think that the 1985 film Real Genius still holds up today. The TL;DW version is that a young, idealistic tech guy learns the hard way that not everyone is as idealistic as he is about technology when a greybeard informs him that the project he just finished is a weapon. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/ Silicon Valley needs more Laszlo Holyfelds.
- throwaway058365 7y ago
  I'm an engineer who recently started at Facebook. I can't speak for the org as a whole, but during the team selection process, the main themes were ads teams and integrity teams (fake account, scraping, security, etc. all fall under that umbrella), so it's something Facebook is taking as seriously as making money. > what do they think of their employer still enabling massive disinformation, astroturfing etc? This isn't a behavior management wants, and there's a lot of internal effort to reduce it. Something the public doesn't get but engineers do is it's impractical to manually review every action on Facebook, human reviewers aren't necessarily more accurate than ML, and you'll always have some amount of abuse. > Just honestly curious how they deal with these issues on their personal moral compass. I have no qualms here. Roads are used during thefts, but no one asks construction workers how they sleep at night knowing the roads they build might facilitate crimes. Spammers gonna spam, but that doesn't mean we can't have any online platforms.
  - ecwilson 7y ago
    I was hoping a Facebook engineer would show up in this thread. If you don't mind, I have a couple of questions. > Something the public doesn't get but engineers do is it's impractical to manually review every action on Facebook, human reviewers aren't necessarily more accurate than ML, and you'll always have some amount of abuse. I'm curious what your thoughts are on other companies (Twitter, Spotify, etc) disabling political ads for this very reason. Facebook has not. It's a given that you can't manually review every political ad -- so why allow them at all, if their disinformation has negative real-world implications? I don't buy Zuck's argument about free speech. Secondly, what would Facebook do if a grassroots movement started to put pressure on advertisers until Facebook cancels political ads? What if this movement recruited real users to click on lots of ads in their own feeds, with the goal of disrupting advertiser ROI with difficult to detect garbage clicks? Would advertisers get upset? Would Facebook have any recourse? Thanks for indulging me on this. The idea came to me in the shower and I'm not sure if it's brilliant or stupid.
    - SubuSS 7y ago
      Disclaimer: I don't work for facebook. I don't speak for my company's policies either. - You overestimate the zeal with which the grass-roots folk will engage in that behavior, especially if they know it is undercutting fb model. Ad tech is also evolving everyday meaning a reCAPTCHA like functionality around whether you are a real engagement vs these clicks aren't very far away. You should also look up the articles about # of twitter/reddit contributors (including likes) compared to the US population for example (VERY minimal). - In theory you can politicize anything: Do you think it is possible to talk environmental/social/civic controls etc. today without having a political bent? Meaning the political ad blocking is probably not as comprehensive as the twitter block portrays. - For all the negativity politics gets, this is something that impacts us very much in our day to day life. Shutting it out completely is probably more of a problem than working with the system. I don't think we can comprehend the macro impact in this subject: As it stands today, some companies saying no just means more money for other corporations. As you can see I do have a very practical (read cynical) view towards how much mental bandwidth people have towards the small slights in life (which may have a giant impact later) compared to their day to day requirements. As lacking I am in solutions, I don't believe it is sledge hammer (stop ads) OR crowd sourced (let's all click on all ads).
- themagician 7y ago
  Why would they even have a response? The advertisers don't really care. Everyone knows that most FB traffic is garbage, but it's easy to sell garbage. And in a few limited circumstances the micro-targeting works. Even if it turned out that most FB/IG traffic was fake it wouldn't change anything until someone comes up with something better. You have to remember how the ad ecosystem works. Until FB came along there was nothing but display and search and the gap was huge. Facebook comfortably occupies the entire middle ground between display and search these days. Even if half the traffic is totally bogus it's still going to be better than display. Every big company pretends to work on these problems for image reasons, but they don't really care. It's always a "special team dedicated to" whatever the flavor is that reports to a kangaroo court. If companies actually cared about these things they could use their immense engineering talent to fix them, or just prevent it in the first place. But BOTH of these mean less revenue at the end of the day. The only way companies would actually prioritize these things is if it had a positive impact on revenue somehow, but it doesn't. Never will. I'll never understand where the idea came from that Facebook had some kind of moral compass as a company that was anything other making money.
- chillacy 7y ago
  > their personal moral compass "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it" Personal morals are just that: personal. Two people can have 100% conviction in their moral position and be totally opposed, it happens all the time in social issues. Moral beliefs also happen to line up with social circles and group interests suspiciously well too (hence the Sinclair quote).
mattferderer 7y ago
After listening to the video I have a hard time seeing the difference between paying for likes vs paying for ads from an ethical stand point. Instead of FB, etc getting ad money, that ad money is being spread out to many others instead. It also seems like this might be more cost effective than ads. I think I would consider this much more ethical than how Google puts the top 3-5 results as "ads" these days. Sometimes I question how long until I have to go to Page 2 to get off the advertised results. Note - In the above I'm only considering this practice being done by legitimate places sharing fairly accurate or honest content. Such as a business trying to promote a sale or a blog piece. I would consider paid ads, paid likes, paid comments, etc., to be unethical if the content they're supporting is false. TLDR: What's the difference between paying Facebook/Google/etc for an ad vs paying someone else to like your post? The 2nd seems like a better solution for a majority of people.
- miohtama 7y ago
  The difference is the disclosure. Only on the other you know that money is being used to affect your opinion on something.
  - mattferderer 7y ago
    Excellent point. Though it can be easy to miss the tiny text that says "advertisement". I recall buying Facebook ads for places in the early days of their system that benefited off this & having it say which friends also liked this content.
- nammi 7y ago
  People expect that companies pay for their ads to be presented. A big reason for buying likes seems to be deceiving people into believing the posts aren't ads. I'd say it's similar to "sponsored content" that doesn't disclose the fact that it's sponsored
  - abcpassword 7y ago
    I make some money via fake clicks. The promoted content is always obviously an ad, and is sometimes literally an ad.
gravitas 7y ago
This may rub some folks raw and be pessimistic, but a half a century on this planet has taught me that any solution which relies on "doing the right thing" (ethics) but does not have any rules, laws or other repercussion for abusing it, then (some entity - person or company) will use your altruistic belief to their own gain, ethics be damned. Just Google "buy reddit upvotes" and the internet is full of folks who will sell you a million Likes for cheap - in my mind, it's just a modern digital con (confidence game) - some of y'all may remember having created self-signed OpenSSL certs with the Snake Oil, Ltd company named in it. :) Even Wikipedia has a page for "there's a sucker born every minute" it's so institutionalized.
- ATsch 7y ago
  I think the more important point here isn't about ethics and punishment, but incentives. The larger a system is and the stronger it incentivises something, the more effort you're going to have to put into enforcing the status. This is why, in general, ideas that involve lots of actors changing their behavior contrary to incentives, instead of changing the incentives, are fundamentally flawed.
  - rpastuszak 7y ago
    +1 Also, I feel like every system can be abused if the incentivised metric is defined poorly. Example: almost every advertising KPI. 1. A Brand wants to sell a product (incentive: sales). 2. Agency sales people want to reach a particular KPI—budget in this case, the higher, the better. 3. An Ad Tech company will serve ads based on a KPI agreed with the Agency (e.g. CPM, impressions). It's very easy to satisfy 2 and 3 without bringing any additional value to 1., for example by applying less strict viewability metrics (is 50% in view "visible" or 1%? should we pause the video ad below the fold? what is an impression, exactly?). The original intent (sell more units of product x) is gone. This is due to systematic issues with the industry, not a single specific company. But mainly, this is due to the fact that the established incentives represent only a chunk of the reality and can be followed without focusing on the actual problem. The overlap between actors' goals is poorly defined, small and often doesn't exist. In a nutshell: if we define a metric serving as a shortcut for our goal, people will find a way of improving the metric, but rarely reaching the goal. A broadly defined incentive is better than punishment.
Trias11 7y ago
"Likes" are as trusted as the platform that created them.
ThomPete 7y ago
There is only one metric that really matters when it comes to using social media as metrics and that is comments. Those are the actual relevant users.
- throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
  I see plenty of bot comments on many sites
- empath75 7y ago
  A lot of them are bots or paid astroturfers, also.
  - ThomPete 7y ago
    Sure and easy to spot, thats not the point.
JohnFen 7y ago
While I don't use FB, this sort of thing is why I no longer give any weight at all to "likes", "upvotes", or product ratings.
nxpnsv 7y ago
A side note: I really like the linear video timeline thing ccc does.
throwaway8291 7y ago
It's also the beauty of capitalism and the creation of new types of work, that can provide value. For every like factory there is a fraud detection startup, so everyone's a winner. Never mind where the "problem" came from in the first place.
- onreact 7y ago
  Yeah, create the problem and then provide the solution is one of the best business models. Climate change is also making people rich now due to this logic.
  - williesleg 7y ago
    Fresh Water is the next Ice Age/Global Warming/Global Climate Change. The Left has been positioning themselves on this for years. Almost ready to pull the trigger.
  - throwno 7y ago
    It is saving anyone from having to actually innovate. Remember when there was a rush of "but on internet" patents and businesses? Well, now there's a bunch of "but green this time" businesses. Not to say they aren't needed, but redoing the last 100 years of tech isn't really moving us forward.
rnd_dude428673 7y ago
FB generates a different user id for each FB application id. "Facebook issues app-scoped user IDs for people who first log into an instance of an app, and page-scoped user IDs for people who first use a Messenger bot. By definition, this means the ID for the same person may be different between these apps and bots." https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/for-business https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/for-business So the 10 billion number the researchers quoted does not necessarily represent individual users.
- filleokus 7y ago
  But since they only query facebook.com/$ID and facebook.com/profile.php?id=$ID, aren't they only looking at one and the same "ID space", and hence only counting once?
- pkreissel 7y ago
  Hi, this is actually incorrect. Facebook uses internal IDs (these are the ones used here, they are valid globally) AND external IDs for Apps and their connected pages. The external IDs have a completely different format and cannot be used to access a profile in the web browser (which is what we were able to do for all of them). We cannot completely rule out, that Facebook assigns two IDs to the same profile. However we think this is highly unlikely. We tried to check for that as far as possible. For example: If I search for a profiles name, that I found via a random ID lookup, and then check that profiles ID, its the same ID that was used in the lookup. We couldn't try this at scale though.
  - rnd_dude428673 7y ago
    It's pretty simple to validate. Create two different FB developer accounts. Then create a Login with FB type app for each account. Then use a third FB account to login to each different app and use the FB Graph api to view the user id in the tokens. It will be different.
- smashah 7y ago
  What you're mentioning is actually a very recent change to Facebook API. So it doesn't relate to the work done in the presentation.
onreact 7y ago
Intriguing. On the other hand Facebook cracks down on new users and requires them to jump through many hoops to access the service. My wife finally gave in and signed up to Facebook in order to be able to take part in a webinar she already payed for that was staged on the platform just to get her new account blocked for using a different device from the one she signed up. They wanted her mobile phone number, photo and her ID (think passport). She didn't want Facebook SPAM on her phone, she already gets bombarded by WhatsApp notifications and sending her photo again didn't help. She got banned for good. Also her IP was blocked so she couldn't sign up again.
weinzierl 7y ago
One interesting thing for me was that the majority of buyers seem to be small shops and individuals. Unfortunately they don't present any hard data on this but their examples and one answer in the Q&A at the end really hint in that direction. I wonder if big brands buy likes in a significant numbers as well?
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Majority of cases is often a poor measure for such things -- what you're interested in is the significance (in the general, not increasingly fraught statistical sense) of the use. There are more small businesses than large ones. But large business practices are, for the most part, far more meaningful. Some metric of net financial or revenue impacts might be a better (though much more difficult to acquire) metric. It's kind of the "space aliens land on Earth, who do they encounter" problem. Most people are located in cities, but cities occupy a small fraction (~<1%) of Earth's surface. By statistical likelihood, your alien is most likely to encounter ... a fish (or plankton). If they find land, they're most likely to find a rural area, and hence rural dweller. Not because that's a statistically accurate sampling of human population but because it's a statistically accurate sampling of human population areal distribution. So: if you look at like-buying campaigns, you'll find, because there are far more small businesses, many more small businesses participating. If you looked at other metrics -- say, bought likes distributed among all commercial accounts -- you'd probably find the weighting swinging far more toward at least moderate-to-large sized businesses. Though: for a small business, some early-stage "growth hacking" might be both a modest budget line, a plausible-sounding practice (not necessarily true, but appearing to be true), and something a likewise ethically challenged black-hat SEO marketer could sell. Then there's the possiblity of joe-job likes -- buying fake likes for a third party in order to present them as fraudulent. Possibly not widespread, but possible, and given the difficulties in attribution, something that's hard to demonstrate one way or the other. Big brands: - Likely have more effective tools. - Have other ways of promoting online content without going through fake likes. (Paid "influencers" being one widely-practiced option.) - Might be aware of the potential downsides and hence avoid this. - Are a much smaller fraction of "like" campaigns, and have a higher "organic" (or at least organic-appearing) rate of user engagements. There are numerous reports of ... large influencers in the political space ... paying $10k - $100k amounts monthly for social media promotion.
msoad 7y ago
The 10 billion active accounts figure can not be right. As someone else mentioned Facebook generates new ID for application users.
- pkreissel 7y ago
  We don't use application level IDs for this but global IDs. These are unique for users (at least we have no evidence otherwise).
DanielBMarkham 7y ago
We've become quite adept at pointing out the conflicting incentives, scaling problems vis-a-vis mobs, and hidden rights violations users agree to without realizing the implications. There is, however, another aspect to this we don't talk about much. Who suffers the most here? It obviously not the social media platforms. They adapt their code and move on. It's not the users, at least in the long run. The problem has been identified and resolved. It's not the people selling likes. They get punished, bail out on some fake accounts and get new ones. Even if you could somehow ban individuals from using platforms, there's a million more people willing to create fake likes from where those came from. It's the poor, as always. The people who know the system is rigged, know the system has to be gamed in order to make money, and are desperately looking for a way to be competitive and get ahead. So they buy some fake likes, then get destroyed by the social media companies. Perhaps they've already invested a lot of time in their presence before they got desperate. In either case, they're not running fake ids. It's just them. And they don't know enough tech to move on. They get slammed for life for making a poor moral choice. Why? Because they're easy to find and it's easy to punish them. That's whack.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- danans 7y ago
  > It's the poor, as always. The people who know the system is rigged, know the system has to be gamed in order to make money, and are desperately looking for a way to be competitive and get ahead. > They get slammed for life for making a poor moral choice. Why? Because they're easy to find and it's easy to punish them. This observation has strong parallels with how the poorest are lowest rung of the drug trade - on the street, and bear the highest price of it - death or imprisonment, while the higher level traffickers usually get away with impunity. But the populace feels good because of the disheveled mugshot of the street drug dealer they saw on the evening news.
  - DanielBMarkham 7y ago
    The drug analogy is very interesting. As you may know, 100-ish years ago, drugs were legal. Some people frowned upon them, some did not. Then there was a great moral uprising followed by legislation, then we had the War on Drugs. Finally the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way. So we've seen most of a full cycle. Continuing your low-level drug dealer example, if that guy that runs the car wash down the street gets banned for using fake likes, why shouldn't he? It was a bad thing to do! We can see him, we know him, he did a bad thing and deserves his punishment. Not only does he deserve his punishment, we should shame him if we can in order to discourage others from contemplating doing the same thing. Maybe if we increase punishment we can see less of that sort of thing around here. Ever hear how a lot of social/internet companies got started? Sock puppets, fake likes, generated social proof, paying off influencers, and so forth. All the things the little, common folk aren't supposed to do today. It seems there is a moral code for the common folk and a separate one for our betters. All animals are equal ... This story, where we find all these millions of fake people and likes, is a "drugs on the table" story: big flash, looks like progress is being made, we have heroes and villains, feats of strength and daring, and people can feel like the net is somehow safer. Then things can go on as usual.
williesleg 7y ago
Who says there need to be factories? They can artifically make likes and retweet and love counts themselves, us sheeple will never know. Twiter, Facebook, Amazon, they've all been doing it for years.
mola 7y ago
Any textual write up available?
- curiousgal 7y ago
  Honestly I was underwhelmed. They started by scraping a site that offered paid likes for a list of their "clients" i.e. the pages to be liked. They talked to a couple of people who got paid to like pages. They then reported that platform to Facebook so they blocked it (dick move towards the workers they interviewed imo) then they noticed how Facebook profile IDs are incremental so they deduced a profile's creation date from that using "interpolation" even though it didn't account for various sparious points. They used that to look at the distribution of certain pages' and like services' liker profile age (recent profiles -> fake, older profiles -> genuine account) and that's about it. Not to be cynical but I don't find this groundbreaking at any shape or form.
cmrdporcupine 7y ago
I'm pretty sure it's not just parties outside of FB, but FB itself is implicated. Out of curiosity I paid to run ads to promote a page associated with a community group I'm trying to get up and running ("Ski the Great Lakes"); I paid about $10 to run an ad for a few days. It became clear after a day or two that most of the engagement was fake; many Indian and Egyptian etc. accounts completely outside of the targeted demographic and clearly not real accounts. A couple months later I'm still getting the odd 'like' from these type of accounts despite not running the campaign. I didn't seek out any third party promotion, just used FB's own promotion tools. (I also find it objectionable that one can run ads to promote commercial pages, but there's no way to do so for "groups"; if I want to spend some $$ to expand actual community engagement, for some non-commerical purpose, I can't. I can only promote a business.)
- ec109685 7y ago
  I don’t think Facebook is paying Indian companies to fake like your ad. Those accounts are probably trying to look legitimate so when they like they’re own pages, the signals are trusted. That said, Facebook should have refunded you obvious non legitimate clicks. Did you report it?
  - cmrdporcupine 7y ago
    That does sound like a reasonable explanation. It's not worth pursuing a refund for a $10 campaign. I'd be doing that if I was serious about it, though.
  - chvid 7y ago
    There are probably parts of Facebook that have incentive to ignore fake accounts and trafic, maybe even encourage it, as they are being measured by increases in user count or some raw quantification of user engagement.
  - brentis 7y ago
    You can set your demographic and still get many foreign likes. They are either using proxy service or something similar. FB does little to discourage and I frankly feel enables to drive revenue. These likes also pollute your account and skew your demographic as they are not sincere. Makes it ultimately difficult to understand your buyer.
chromaton 7y ago
I wrote about this a year ago on my blog: https://planiverse.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/advertising-to-⅔-fake-users-on-facebook/ https://planiverse.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/advertising-to-⅔... In short, the fake accounts had several factors in common: - No or almost no public posts. - The only public posts being an update of the cover photo and profile photo in 2017. - The profile photos tended not to be headshots: a photo of a cup of coffee, say, or a landscape. - Between 20-100 friends. - Friends tended to be in places like India, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia. - Their gender didn’t match the name or photo about half the time: a “Martha” referred to as “he” by Facebook, for example.
SeanFerree 7y ago
Never trust a "like"
kops 7y ago
What is worst than being popular? Perhaps bought popularity. A team member decided to boost an instagram post(same FB platform) expecting a few tens of likes to start the virtuous cycle. We got a few thousand likes. It is our most embarrassing post ever and the worst part is that I haven't deleted that post yet. FB and instagram are black mirrors that make me wonder who am I and how low I can stoop.
NilsIRL 7y ago
I think the line between was is ethical and isn't is very blurry and there is almost no reason why advertising is ethical.
genode_fan 7y ago
Given the power of modern day corporate actors, this is a competitive tactic, morals notwithstanding. I thought it was interesting that one person in the video did not view this as a form of fraud. But I have difficulty seeing how this is not fraud. It doesn't seem likely that everyone knows what is authentically or artificially amplified. Even if people do view the internet social atmosphere around them with caution, it's difficult to find who exactly is behind the amplification and to what extent. On other platforms such as reddit I suspect that there has been further political activity. For nation-state actors, it is a modern form of agit-prop that is probably superior in both its effectiveness and its ability for fine-grained control. What's interesting is how this approach can utilize the idea of proxy control on so many fronts. In the US, the citizens themselves are being gamed as proxies for foreign voting power. Malicious actors hide behind proxy servers as well, which adds another avenue of difficulty in dealing with the problem. And then there are the botnet overlords. An instance of a normal person posing with their own identity once is its own bit of fun, but now that commercial and then national actors are involved it's a whole different ball park. If your fridge supports the other candidate and products from its superior overlord should this be the advent of bot rights or total bot enslavement? I partly jest. I did a quick Google Translate and read the Vice Germany article they referenced and it's an entertaining read. I recommend it. If you want to look it up, the title is "Die Applausfabrik: So funktioniert die Industrie hinter gekauften Likes und Followern".
stevenicr 7y ago
I've been curious about the ?fbcid=lkjwejowijtoirj14j blah blah that fbook adds to urls then you click over.. I think this id is always the same(?) - so it's another layer of fingerprinting. I don't use fbook enough for it to be a big issue - and I had assumed it was always a unique string so fbook could track ads, but I am now things it's not different each time and it's another identifier than can be used by god knows how many groups and peoples to track - when I am employing several other systems to stop tracking - this is crazy - is there a way to strip this auto?
- Oppertunity123 7y ago
  Probably a http request tracking ID that can be used for debugging the request.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    It's a "Facebook click ID" and it's likely intended to evade Safari's "Intelligent Tracking Prevention" on third-party cookies.
    - jtbayly 7y ago
      This. We knew this was coming when Safari added that.
- mike_d 7y ago
  FBCLID is "Facebook Click ID". It is sent to third party sites as a URL parameter so that if an advertiser complains about fake clicks or something they can provide the IDs and the Facebook advertising team knows which ones they are talking about. Analytics companies (I think Google and a few others) can pay Facebook to get data on your behalf like what page it came from and the demographics of the visitor. Google AdWords does this as well on paid clicks with GCLID
  - stevenicr 7y ago
    This is terrible. Someone with access to server logs at a few web sites (or someone that loads a third party resource (ads, analytics, sharethis buttons, etc) onto a few web sites) would be able to know exactly who is coming from fbook and viewing different types of content.. no inside access to fbook or their data required. I can't believe nothing is auto-stripping this url addition between firefox and ublock origin - must find and tell others.
patrickany 7y ago
I mirror'd a copy of the video to Vimeo for those eager to see it and are having problems with upstream. I suspect they're having trouble dealing with the HN-effect. https://vimeo.com/382103218/bbe2fe74c3 https://vimeo.com/382103218/bbe2fe74c3
- netsharc 7y ago
  They already mirror their videos on YouTube...
doener 7y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21910573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21910573
bob_theslob646 7y ago
Is there a way to remain anonymous but verify that the person is a human?
z3ugma 7y ago
Oof - what is an "ordinary guy" and why is that person not Asian? >"you instantly think of mobile phones strung together in multiple lines in front of an Asian woman or man. What if we tell you, that this is not necessarily the whole truth? That you better imagine a ordinary guy sitting at home at his computer? "
- ronsor 7y ago
  The sentence, though worded a bit awkwardly, is not implying there is anything strange about Asians, but it is implying that anyone who has dozens of phones in multiple lines is odd. The many phones is what makes the person "not ordinary."
edisonjoao 7y ago
damn

626 points by sturza 7y ago

Very curious about what Facebook's response is to this (outside the response mentioned in the talk, which is clearly not sufficient) Also, if there are any FB employees on here, what do they think of their employer still enabling massive disinformation, astroturfing etc? To be clear, I'm not blaming individual employees. Just honestly curious how they deal with these issues on their personal moral compass.

abrodersen 7y ago
I'm assuming the ones in denial will say something like "It's up to the individual to evaluate the quality of the content e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶w̶e̶ ̶e̶n̶g̶i̶n̶e̶e̶r̶ ̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶p̶l̶a̶t̶f̶o̶r̶m̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶g̶e̶n̶e̶r̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶i̶n̶s̶t̶a̶n̶t̶a̶n̶e̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶e̶m̶o̶t̶i̶o̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶r̶e̶s̶p̶o̶n̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶m̶a̶x̶i̶m̶i̶z̶e̶ ̶e̶n̶g̶a̶g̶e̶m̶e̶n̶t̶."
dwnvoted2hell 7y ago
How can you have a moral compass when all you do is use your platform to make as much money as humanly possible year after year? We've seen this in Facebook. We've seen this in China. And we've seen this same problem with Alphabet - why would you want to be screwed by more than one letter?
netfl0 7y ago
Any thoughts on alternative approach they could use--what would it look like etc? Would there be any undesirable consequences of a different approach?
- tnolet 7y ago
  Approach to what? User registration? Tracking fake accounts?
  - netfl0 7y ago
    > Very curious about what Facebook's response is to this (outside the response mentioned in the talk, which is clearly not sufficient) i.e. what would be sufficient in your view?
    - tnolet 7y ago
      Gotcha. Well, I'm not really sure. Maybe just making likes private or banning likes (as suggested in the talk). Or banning political advertising completely (see the part in the talk on political parties in Germany buying likes). Or something that completely destroys meddling and fraud and is observable by the public. The "we are working on it behind the scenes"-response is just not sufficient in my view.
    - zo1 7y ago
      You could go down the route of what Slashdot did back in the day. "Likes" were something you could only give out after getting them. So you merely passed them along (like money in a market, sorta). And getting those likes was difficult and hard to game. It was a sort of "pay it forward" system with random batches of "likes" being seeded into the community based on some sort of measurable behavior, after which the community would recycle it internally based on the like being a token of "reward". Whereas with current social media. Likes are given to users with out any care other than "hey you seem to be a valid user, let's allow you to generate large amounts of likes".
asdernr 7y ago
Are you seriously this naive? No matter what they will think. Facebook pays their rent... So working there and standing up agains the Zucc as a small employee is pointless.
- kranner 7y ago
  That's what throwaway accounts are for.
- imgabe 7y ago
  For a lot of employees, Facebook pays enough that paying your rent should not be an issue after a couple of years working there if you're in any way financially responsible.
- reroute1 7y ago
  ok... but this is kind of a problem that Facebook wants to fix also, so where is the conflict with "Zucc" ?
ethbro 7y ago
That's kind of like asking how Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn feel about intelligence services tapping internet traffic. Not very useful. A more cogent question would be "For anyone in Facebook working on this problem, do you feel like sufficient organizational resources are being spent combating it? Is there low hanging fruit, or are we into the whack-a-mole stage of any popular platform with a financial incentive to cheat?"
- Fordec 7y ago
  I don't know, I would like to hear Vint Cerf do a talk on intelligence services. Particularly if the second half of the topic is spitballing solutions.
  - LinuxBender 7y ago
    There are videos of him talking about the inception of the internet. In fact, he explains in detail how we wanted to be able to have mobile military units that could relay data back to HQ real time in enemy territory and that was why ARPA created the internet. I don't want to misquote him, but essentially he said something to the effect of it isn't like you can ask your enemy to set up a network for you just prior to invasion
    - rhizome 7y ago
      Vint ain't never been the Freedom Rider, he's the cop (so to speak).
- daliusd 7y ago
  If you are developer try using https://github.com/instagrambot/instabot https://github.com/instagrambot/instabot (Instagram is part of Facebook). You will be blocked quite fast. For research and fun I did things more sophisticated than instabot and still got blocked. So Facebook as company is researching this area and is actively using whatever is possible. I'm pretty sure they will get much better in the future. In the end they want companies to buy ads and if competition gives better result than they do, they will lose.
janpot 7y ago
what do you think about the oversea slavery that made your clothes and your phone? to be clear, I'm not blaming you as an individual, just honestly curious about your moral compass.
piokoch 7y ago
Frankly I don't understand this kind of "calls to action" directed to company X employeese. First of all, it is not like FB employees are pushing people into gas chambers in Dachau, FB usage is not obligatory, what I keep telling everyone who complains about FB censorship or privacy abuse - I don't have FB account because of that. In the same way we might ask to step out Coca Cola employees (say, delivery truck drivers), because drinking Coke is bad for ones health. Or HSBC employees because HSBC was laundering narco cartels money? Or John Deere employees because company forbids farmers to modify tractor software? All of those practices are immoral and bad, but why chase the weakest, whose income, ability to pay rent, etc. depends on the employer? Why not target those, who are really responsible for that what is happening and who make huge money thanks to that? I would say it makes much more sense to vote with our money, avoid services and products from companies we consider immoral. Publicly discourage people from using such services and products, publicly stand against CEOs, shareholders of those companies, spread the knowledge about their personal responsibility for such kind of behavior - this is not that difficult and actually can make a difference. Imagine PR outcome of a conference that would invite Mark Zuckerberg, but no one else would want to attend it? Mark shows up on, say, TED, and all the people leave the room during his talk? In the media-driven World surely this would become "viral" and even Mark with all his money couldn't ignore that easily.
- hydgv 7y ago
  >FB usage is not obligatory, what I keep telling everyone who complains about FB censorship or privacy abuse - I don't have FB account because of that. Wow are you saying that people should take responsibility for their actions and should let others choose freely what to do?
  - asdf21 7y ago
    Sounds like privilege. /s
  - jen20 7y ago
    Shadow profiles, anyone? The idea that Facebook does not attempt to spy on former or non-users is laughable.
ryacko 7y ago
If Facebook were to defeat astroturfing, all advertising firms would just promote their new social media network on all the major news networks. Our economy is founded upon mutual relationships of grift and greed, even if Zuckerberg were to disagree with his own platform, he would not be able to change it.
cjslep 7y ago
This kind of poisonous invitation to grandstand might as well be grandstanding in and of itself, and all of these performative paper ethics makes me want to puke.
brnt 7y ago
What is surprising is your assumption Facebook isn't aware of this. Nay, that Facebook was not designed for this very purpose. Facebook, who employs some of the top data analysts and AI specialists, actively building tooling on the cutting edge of those fields, who's funded primarily by commercial use of its platform, with the for-pay 'reach' being the most obvious monetization scheme. I don't see how you could be missing that everything about Facebook incentivizes nonsense such as like-factories.
reaperducer 7y ago
Every time yet another scandal comes out of Facebook, Google, etc... I think that the 1985 film Real Genius still holds up today. The TL;DW version is that a young, idealistic tech guy learns the hard way that not everyone is as idealistic as he is about technology when a greybeard informs him that the project he just finished is a weapon. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/ Silicon Valley needs more Laszlo Holyfelds.
throwaway058365 7y ago
I'm an engineer who recently started at Facebook. I can't speak for the org as a whole, but during the team selection process, the main themes were ads teams and integrity teams (fake account, scraping, security, etc. all fall under that umbrella), so it's something Facebook is taking as seriously as making money. > what do they think of their employer still enabling massive disinformation, astroturfing etc? This isn't a behavior management wants, and there's a lot of internal effort to reduce it. Something the public doesn't get but engineers do is it's impractical to manually review every action on Facebook, human reviewers aren't necessarily more accurate than ML, and you'll always have some amount of abuse. > Just honestly curious how they deal with these issues on their personal moral compass. I have no qualms here. Roads are used during thefts, but no one asks construction workers how they sleep at night knowing the roads they build might facilitate crimes. Spammers gonna spam, but that doesn't mean we can't have any online platforms.
- ecwilson 7y ago
  I was hoping a Facebook engineer would show up in this thread. If you don't mind, I have a couple of questions. > Something the public doesn't get but engineers do is it's impractical to manually review every action on Facebook, human reviewers aren't necessarily more accurate than ML, and you'll always have some amount of abuse. I'm curious what your thoughts are on other companies (Twitter, Spotify, etc) disabling political ads for this very reason. Facebook has not. It's a given that you can't manually review every political ad -- so why allow them at all, if their disinformation has negative real-world implications? I don't buy Zuck's argument about free speech. Secondly, what would Facebook do if a grassroots movement started to put pressure on advertisers until Facebook cancels political ads? What if this movement recruited real users to click on lots of ads in their own feeds, with the goal of disrupting advertiser ROI with difficult to detect garbage clicks? Would advertisers get upset? Would Facebook have any recourse? Thanks for indulging me on this. The idea came to me in the shower and I'm not sure if it's brilliant or stupid.
  - SubuSS 7y ago
    Disclaimer: I don't work for facebook. I don't speak for my company's policies either. - You overestimate the zeal with which the grass-roots folk will engage in that behavior, especially if they know it is undercutting fb model. Ad tech is also evolving everyday meaning a reCAPTCHA like functionality around whether you are a real engagement vs these clicks aren't very far away. You should also look up the articles about # of twitter/reddit contributors (including likes) compared to the US population for example (VERY minimal). - In theory you can politicize anything: Do you think it is possible to talk environmental/social/civic controls etc. today without having a political bent? Meaning the political ad blocking is probably not as comprehensive as the twitter block portrays. - For all the negativity politics gets, this is something that impacts us very much in our day to day life. Shutting it out completely is probably more of a problem than working with the system. I don't think we can comprehend the macro impact in this subject: As it stands today, some companies saying no just means more money for other corporations. As you can see I do have a very practical (read cynical) view towards how much mental bandwidth people have towards the small slights in life (which may have a giant impact later) compared to their day to day requirements. As lacking I am in solutions, I don't believe it is sledge hammer (stop ads) OR crowd sourced (let's all click on all ads).
themagician 7y ago
Why would they even have a response? The advertisers don't really care. Everyone knows that most FB traffic is garbage, but it's easy to sell garbage. And in a few limited circumstances the micro-targeting works. Even if it turned out that most FB/IG traffic was fake it wouldn't change anything until someone comes up with something better. You have to remember how the ad ecosystem works. Until FB came along there was nothing but display and search and the gap was huge. Facebook comfortably occupies the entire middle ground between display and search these days. Even if half the traffic is totally bogus it's still going to be better than display. Every big company pretends to work on these problems for image reasons, but they don't really care. It's always a "special team dedicated to" whatever the flavor is that reports to a kangaroo court. If companies actually cared about these things they could use their immense engineering talent to fix them, or just prevent it in the first place. But BOTH of these mean less revenue at the end of the day. The only way companies would actually prioritize these things is if it had a positive impact on revenue somehow, but it doesn't. Never will. I'll never understand where the idea came from that Facebook had some kind of moral compass as a company that was anything other making money.
chillacy 7y ago
> their personal moral compass "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it" Personal morals are just that: personal. Two people can have 100% conviction in their moral position and be totally opposed, it happens all the time in social issues. Moral beliefs also happen to line up with social circles and group interests suspiciously well too (hence the Sinclair quote).

mattferderer 7y ago

After listening to the video I have a hard time seeing the difference between paying for likes vs paying for ads from an ethical stand point. Instead of FB, etc getting ad money, that ad money is being spread out to many others instead. It also seems like this might be more cost effective than ads. I think I would consider this much more ethical than how Google puts the top 3-5 results as "ads" these days. Sometimes I question how long until I have to go to Page 2 to get off the advertised results. Note - In the above I'm only considering this practice being done by legitimate places sharing fairly accurate or honest content. Such as a business trying to promote a sale or a blog piece. I would consider paid ads, paid likes, paid comments, etc., to be unethical if the content they're supporting is false. TLDR: What's the difference between paying Facebook/Google/etc for an ad vs paying someone else to like your post? The 2nd seems like a better solution for a majority of people.

miohtama 7y ago
The difference is the disclosure. Only on the other you know that money is being used to affect your opinion on something.
- mattferderer 7y ago
  Excellent point. Though it can be easy to miss the tiny text that says "advertisement". I recall buying Facebook ads for places in the early days of their system that benefited off this & having it say which friends also liked this content.
nammi 7y ago
People expect that companies pay for their ads to be presented. A big reason for buying likes seems to be deceiving people into believing the posts aren't ads. I'd say it's similar to "sponsored content" that doesn't disclose the fact that it's sponsored
- abcpassword 7y ago
  I make some money via fake clicks. The promoted content is always obviously an ad, and is sometimes literally an ad.

gravitas 7y ago

This may rub some folks raw and be pessimistic, but a half a century on this planet has taught me that any solution which relies on "doing the right thing" (ethics) but does not have any rules, laws or other repercussion for abusing it, then (some entity - person or company) will use your altruistic belief to their own gain, ethics be damned. Just Google "buy reddit upvotes" and the internet is full of folks who will sell you a million Likes for cheap - in my mind, it's just a modern digital con (confidence game) - some of y'all may remember having created self-signed OpenSSL certs with the Snake Oil, Ltd company named in it. :) Even Wikipedia has a page for "there's a sucker born every minute" it's so institutionalized.

ATsch 7y ago
I think the more important point here isn't about ethics and punishment, but incentives. The larger a system is and the stronger it incentivises something, the more effort you're going to have to put into enforcing the status. This is why, in general, ideas that involve lots of actors changing their behavior contrary to incentives, instead of changing the incentives, are fundamentally flawed.
- rpastuszak 7y ago
  +1 Also, I feel like every system can be abused if the incentivised metric is defined poorly. Example: almost every advertising KPI. 1. A Brand wants to sell a product (incentive: sales). 2. Agency sales people want to reach a particular KPI—budget in this case, the higher, the better. 3. An Ad Tech company will serve ads based on a KPI agreed with the Agency (e.g. CPM, impressions). It's very easy to satisfy 2 and 3 without bringing any additional value to 1., for example by applying less strict viewability metrics (is 50% in view "visible" or 1%? should we pause the video ad below the fold? what is an impression, exactly?). The original intent (sell more units of product x) is gone. This is due to systematic issues with the industry, not a single specific company. But mainly, this is due to the fact that the established incentives represent only a chunk of the reality and can be followed without focusing on the actual problem. The overlap between actors' goals is poorly defined, small and often doesn't exist. In a nutshell: if we define a metric serving as a shortcut for our goal, people will find a way of improving the metric, but rarely reaching the goal. A broadly defined incentive is better than punishment.

Trias11 7y ago

"Likes" are as trusted as the platform that created them.

ThomPete 7y ago

There is only one metric that really matters when it comes to using social media as metrics and that is comments. Those are the actual relevant users.

throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
I see plenty of bot comments on many sites
empath75 7y ago
A lot of them are bots or paid astroturfers, also.
- ThomPete 7y ago
  Sure and easy to spot, thats not the point.

JohnFen 7y ago

While I don't use FB, this sort of thing is why I no longer give any weight at all to "likes", "upvotes", or product ratings.

nxpnsv 7y ago

A side note: I really like the linear video timeline thing ccc does.

throwaway8291 7y ago

It's also the beauty of capitalism and the creation of new types of work, that can provide value. For every like factory there is a fraud detection startup, so everyone's a winner. Never mind where the "problem" came from in the first place.

onreact 7y ago
Yeah, create the problem and then provide the solution is one of the best business models. Climate change is also making people rich now due to this logic.
- williesleg 7y ago
  Fresh Water is the next Ice Age/Global Warming/Global Climate Change. The Left has been positioning themselves on this for years. Almost ready to pull the trigger.
- throwno 7y ago
  It is saving anyone from having to actually innovate. Remember when there was a rush of "but on internet" patents and businesses? Well, now there's a bunch of "but green this time" businesses. Not to say they aren't needed, but redoing the last 100 years of tech isn't really moving us forward.

rnd_dude428673 7y ago

FB generates a different user id for each FB application id. "Facebook issues app-scoped user IDs for people who first log into an instance of an app, and page-scoped user IDs for people who first use a Messenger bot. By definition, this means the ID for the same person may be different between these apps and bots." https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/for-business https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/for-business So the 10 billion number the researchers quoted does not necessarily represent individual users.

filleokus 7y ago
But since they only query facebook.com/$ID and facebook.com/profile.php?id=$ID, aren't they only looking at one and the same "ID space", and hence only counting once?
pkreissel 7y ago
Hi, this is actually incorrect. Facebook uses internal IDs (these are the ones used here, they are valid globally) AND external IDs for Apps and their connected pages. The external IDs have a completely different format and cannot be used to access a profile in the web browser (which is what we were able to do for all of them). We cannot completely rule out, that Facebook assigns two IDs to the same profile. However we think this is highly unlikely. We tried to check for that as far as possible. For example: If I search for a profiles name, that I found via a random ID lookup, and then check that profiles ID, its the same ID that was used in the lookup. We couldn't try this at scale though.
- rnd_dude428673 7y ago
  It's pretty simple to validate. Create two different FB developer accounts. Then create a Login with FB type app for each account. Then use a third FB account to login to each different app and use the FB Graph api to view the user id in the tokens. It will be different.
smashah 7y ago
What you're mentioning is actually a very recent change to Facebook API. So it doesn't relate to the work done in the presentation.

onreact 7y ago

Intriguing. On the other hand Facebook cracks down on new users and requires them to jump through many hoops to access the service. My wife finally gave in and signed up to Facebook in order to be able to take part in a webinar she already payed for that was staged on the platform just to get her new account blocked for using a different device from the one she signed up. They wanted her mobile phone number, photo and her ID (think passport). She didn't want Facebook SPAM on her phone, she already gets bombarded by WhatsApp notifications and sending her photo again didn't help. She got banned for good. Also her IP was blocked so she couldn't sign up again.

weinzierl 7y ago

One interesting thing for me was that the majority of buyers seem to be small shops and individuals. Unfortunately they don't present any hard data on this but their examples and one answer in the Q&A at the end really hint in that direction. I wonder if big brands buy likes in a significant numbers as well?

dredmorbius 7y ago
Majority of cases is often a poor measure for such things -- what you're interested in is the significance (in the general, not increasingly fraught statistical sense) of the use. There are more small businesses than large ones. But large business practices are, for the most part, far more meaningful. Some metric of net financial or revenue impacts might be a better (though much more difficult to acquire) metric. It's kind of the "space aliens land on Earth, who do they encounter" problem. Most people are located in cities, but cities occupy a small fraction (~<1%) of Earth's surface. By statistical likelihood, your alien is most likely to encounter ... a fish (or plankton). If they find land, they're most likely to find a rural area, and hence rural dweller. Not because that's a statistically accurate sampling of human population but because it's a statistically accurate sampling of human population areal distribution. So: if you look at like-buying campaigns, you'll find, because there are far more small businesses, many more small businesses participating. If you looked at other metrics -- say, bought likes distributed among all commercial accounts -- you'd probably find the weighting swinging far more toward at least moderate-to-large sized businesses. Though: for a small business, some early-stage "growth hacking" might be both a modest budget line, a plausible-sounding practice (not necessarily true, but appearing to be true), and something a likewise ethically challenged black-hat SEO marketer could sell. Then there's the possiblity of joe-job likes -- buying fake likes for a third party in order to present them as fraudulent. Possibly not widespread, but possible, and given the difficulties in attribution, something that's hard to demonstrate one way or the other. Big brands: - Likely have more effective tools. - Have other ways of promoting online content without going through fake likes. (Paid "influencers" being one widely-practiced option.) - Might be aware of the potential downsides and hence avoid this. - Are a much smaller fraction of "like" campaigns, and have a higher "organic" (or at least organic-appearing) rate of user engagements. There are numerous reports of ... large influencers in the political space ... paying $10k - $100k amounts monthly for social media promotion.

msoad 7y ago

The 10 billion active accounts figure can not be right. As someone else mentioned Facebook generates new ID for application users.

pkreissel 7y ago
We don't use application level IDs for this but global IDs. These are unique for users (at least we have no evidence otherwise).

DanielBMarkham 7y ago

We've become quite adept at pointing out the conflicting incentives, scaling problems vis-a-vis mobs, and hidden rights violations users agree to without realizing the implications. There is, however, another aspect to this we don't talk about much. Who suffers the most here? It obviously not the social media platforms. They adapt their code and move on. It's not the users, at least in the long run. The problem has been identified and resolved. It's not the people selling likes. They get punished, bail out on some fake accounts and get new ones. Even if you could somehow ban individuals from using platforms, there's a million more people willing to create fake likes from where those came from. It's the poor, as always. The people who know the system is rigged, know the system has to be gamed in order to make money, and are desperately looking for a way to be competitive and get ahead. So they buy some fake likes, then get destroyed by the social media companies. Perhaps they've already invested a lot of time in their presence before they got desperate. In either case, they're not running fake ids. It's just them. And they don't know enough tech to move on. They get slammed for life for making a poor moral choice. Why? Because they're easy to find and it's easy to punish them. That's whack.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
danans 7y ago
> It's the poor, as always. The people who know the system is rigged, know the system has to be gamed in order to make money, and are desperately looking for a way to be competitive and get ahead. > They get slammed for life for making a poor moral choice. Why? Because they're easy to find and it's easy to punish them. This observation has strong parallels with how the poorest are lowest rung of the drug trade - on the street, and bear the highest price of it - death or imprisonment, while the higher level traffickers usually get away with impunity. But the populace feels good because of the disheveled mugshot of the street drug dealer they saw on the evening news.
- DanielBMarkham 7y ago
  The drug analogy is very interesting. As you may know, 100-ish years ago, drugs were legal. Some people frowned upon them, some did not. Then there was a great moral uprising followed by legislation, then we had the War on Drugs. Finally the pendulum seems to be swinging the other way. So we've seen most of a full cycle. Continuing your low-level drug dealer example, if that guy that runs the car wash down the street gets banned for using fake likes, why shouldn't he? It was a bad thing to do! We can see him, we know him, he did a bad thing and deserves his punishment. Not only does he deserve his punishment, we should shame him if we can in order to discourage others from contemplating doing the same thing. Maybe if we increase punishment we can see less of that sort of thing around here. Ever hear how a lot of social/internet companies got started? Sock puppets, fake likes, generated social proof, paying off influencers, and so forth. All the things the little, common folk aren't supposed to do today. It seems there is a moral code for the common folk and a separate one for our betters. All animals are equal ... This story, where we find all these millions of fake people and likes, is a "drugs on the table" story: big flash, looks like progress is being made, we have heroes and villains, feats of strength and daring, and people can feel like the net is somehow safer. Then things can go on as usual.

williesleg 7y ago

Who says there need to be factories? They can artifically make likes and retweet and love counts themselves, us sheeple will never know. Twiter, Facebook, Amazon, they've all been doing it for years.

mola 7y ago

Any textual write up available?

curiousgal 7y ago
Honestly I was underwhelmed. They started by scraping a site that offered paid likes for a list of their "clients" i.e. the pages to be liked. They talked to a couple of people who got paid to like pages. They then reported that platform to Facebook so they blocked it (dick move towards the workers they interviewed imo) then they noticed how Facebook profile IDs are incremental so they deduced a profile's creation date from that using "interpolation" even though it didn't account for various sparious points. They used that to look at the distribution of certain pages' and like services' liker profile age (recent profiles -> fake, older profiles -> genuine account) and that's about it. Not to be cynical but I don't find this groundbreaking at any shape or form.

cmrdporcupine 7y ago

I'm pretty sure it's not just parties outside of FB, but FB itself is implicated. Out of curiosity I paid to run ads to promote a page associated with a community group I'm trying to get up and running ("Ski the Great Lakes"); I paid about $10 to run an ad for a few days. It became clear after a day or two that most of the engagement was fake; many Indian and Egyptian etc. accounts completely outside of the targeted demographic and clearly not real accounts. A couple months later I'm still getting the odd 'like' from these type of accounts despite not running the campaign. I didn't seek out any third party promotion, just used FB's own promotion tools. (I also find it objectionable that one can run ads to promote commercial pages, but there's no way to do so for "groups"; if I want to spend some $$ to expand actual community engagement, for some non-commerical purpose, I can't. I can only promote a business.)

ec109685 7y ago
I don’t think Facebook is paying Indian companies to fake like your ad. Those accounts are probably trying to look legitimate so when they like they’re own pages, the signals are trusted. That said, Facebook should have refunded you obvious non legitimate clicks. Did you report it?
- cmrdporcupine 7y ago
  That does sound like a reasonable explanation. It's not worth pursuing a refund for a $10 campaign. I'd be doing that if I was serious about it, though.
- chvid 7y ago
  There are probably parts of Facebook that have incentive to ignore fake accounts and trafic, maybe even encourage it, as they are being measured by increases in user count or some raw quantification of user engagement.
- brentis 7y ago
  You can set your demographic and still get many foreign likes. They are either using proxy service or something similar. FB does little to discourage and I frankly feel enables to drive revenue. These likes also pollute your account and skew your demographic as they are not sincere. Makes it ultimately difficult to understand your buyer.

chromaton 7y ago

I wrote about this a year ago on my blog: https://planiverse.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/advertising-to-⅔-fake-users-on-facebook/ https://planiverse.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/advertising-to-⅔... In short, the fake accounts had several factors in common: - No or almost no public posts. - The only public posts being an update of the cover photo and profile photo in 2017. - The profile photos tended not to be headshots: a photo of a cup of coffee, say, or a landscape. - Between 20-100 friends. - Friends tended to be in places like India, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia. - Their gender didn’t match the name or photo about half the time: a “Martha” referred to as “he” by Facebook, for example.

SeanFerree 7y ago

Never trust a "like"

kops 7y ago

What is worst than being popular? Perhaps bought popularity. A team member decided to boost an instagram post(same FB platform) expecting a few tens of likes to start the virtuous cycle. We got a few thousand likes. It is our most embarrassing post ever and the worst part is that I haven't deleted that post yet. FB and instagram are black mirrors that make me wonder who am I and how low I can stoop.

NilsIRL 7y ago

I think the line between was is ethical and isn't is very blurry and there is almost no reason why advertising is ethical.

genode_fan 7y ago

Given the power of modern day corporate actors, this is a competitive tactic, morals notwithstanding. I thought it was interesting that one person in the video did not view this as a form of fraud. But I have difficulty seeing how this is not fraud. It doesn't seem likely that everyone knows what is authentically or artificially amplified. Even if people do view the internet social atmosphere around them with caution, it's difficult to find who exactly is behind the amplification and to what extent. On other platforms such as reddit I suspect that there has been further political activity. For nation-state actors, it is a modern form of agit-prop that is probably superior in both its effectiveness and its ability for fine-grained control. What's interesting is how this approach can utilize the idea of proxy control on so many fronts. In the US, the citizens themselves are being gamed as proxies for foreign voting power. Malicious actors hide behind proxy servers as well, which adds another avenue of difficulty in dealing with the problem. And then there are the botnet overlords. An instance of a normal person posing with their own identity once is its own bit of fun, but now that commercial and then national actors are involved it's a whole different ball park. If your fridge supports the other candidate and products from its superior overlord should this be the advent of bot rights or total bot enslavement? I partly jest. I did a quick Google Translate and read the Vice Germany article they referenced and it's an entertaining read. I recommend it. If you want to look it up, the title is "Die Applausfabrik: So funktioniert die Industrie hinter gekauften Likes und Followern".

stevenicr 7y ago

I've been curious about the ?fbcid=lkjwejowijtoirj14j blah blah that fbook adds to urls then you click over.. I think this id is always the same(?) - so it's another layer of fingerprinting. I don't use fbook enough for it to be a big issue - and I had assumed it was always a unique string so fbook could track ads, but I am now things it's not different each time and it's another identifier than can be used by god knows how many groups and peoples to track - when I am employing several other systems to stop tracking - this is crazy - is there a way to strip this auto?

Oppertunity123 7y ago
Probably a http request tracking ID that can be used for debugging the request.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  It's a "Facebook click ID" and it's likely intended to evade Safari's "Intelligent Tracking Prevention" on third-party cookies.
  - jtbayly 7y ago
    This. We knew this was coming when Safari added that.
mike_d 7y ago
FBCLID is "Facebook Click ID". It is sent to third party sites as a URL parameter so that if an advertiser complains about fake clicks or something they can provide the IDs and the Facebook advertising team knows which ones they are talking about. Analytics companies (I think Google and a few others) can pay Facebook to get data on your behalf like what page it came from and the demographics of the visitor. Google AdWords does this as well on paid clicks with GCLID
- stevenicr 7y ago
  This is terrible. Someone with access to server logs at a few web sites (or someone that loads a third party resource (ads, analytics, sharethis buttons, etc) onto a few web sites) would be able to know exactly who is coming from fbook and viewing different types of content.. no inside access to fbook or their data required. I can't believe nothing is auto-stripping this url addition between firefox and ublock origin - must find and tell others.

patrickany 7y ago

I mirror'd a copy of the video to Vimeo for those eager to see it and are having problems with upstream. I suspect they're having trouble dealing with the HN-effect. https://vimeo.com/382103218/bbe2fe74c3 https://vimeo.com/382103218/bbe2fe74c3

netsharc 7y ago
They already mirror their videos on YouTube...

doener 7y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21910573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21910573

bob_theslob646 7y ago

Is there a way to remain anonymous but verify that the person is a human?

z3ugma 7y ago

Oof - what is an "ordinary guy" and why is that person not Asian? >"you instantly think of mobile phones strung together in multiple lines in front of an Asian woman or man. What if we tell you, that this is not necessarily the whole truth? That you better imagine a ordinary guy sitting at home at his computer? "

ronsor 7y ago
The sentence, though worded a bit awkwardly, is not implying there is anything strange about Asians, but it is implying that anyone who has dozens of phones in multiple lines is odd. The many phones is what makes the person "not ordinary."

edisonjoao 7y ago

damn