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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
by 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 agoI 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 agoThere 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 agoVint ain't never been the Freedom Rider, he's the cop (so to speak).
- daliusd 7y agoIf 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.
- tnolet 7y agoThis doesn't tackle the click farms / click workers though...
- r_singh 7y agoUse selenium or puppeteer with stealth plugins and a real user agent and I suspect it will be A LOT harder for them to block you.
- daliusd 7y agoI have written browser extension.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 867-5309 7y agohow sophisticated is it? a browser extension sounds pretty high-level and limited to me. does it just use the host browser's user agent? or is it able to spoof multiple legitimate user agents, connect to fb via proxy servers, handle queueing, rotation, retirement, etc.? in which case how is a browser extension more useful than [scripting language of choice]?
- mr__y 7y agoThere are a lot of JS-based detection techniques that rely on things being or not being available. By using an actual browser you have JS/WASM environment that is identical to what is expected from a real user. By using [scripting language of choice] you would need to emulate everything that a given bot-detection system tries to check. From my very limited experience there are two main categories of websites: 1. Using curl and/or [library of your choice] in a [scripting language of choice] is enough 2. Forget about not being detected without a full blown browser unless you want to spend endless hours trying to emulate whatever is needed to be emulated and also willing to burn some accounts and IPs in the process.
- asdf21 7y agoI'd assume these fake likes improve the metrics of most managers... "look at the improved user activity since rollout of X feature!" There's probably not much incentivation to investigate them too deeply.
- peterwwillis 7y agoI think there's already an answer to this. In a large organization, such a pervasive and difficult problem can't be solved in a direct fashion, because there's always some weird alternate consideration that keeps it from getting tackled. Only a top-down initiative from C-level implemented across the organization has a chance at rooting it out, and if such an initiative existed we'd have heard about it and gotten yearly progress reports. I think what we're seeing instead is the same as counterfeits or promoted search results at Amazon: solving it could become an existential threat to either popularity or profit, so they're just "managing" it as BAU.
- ethbro 7y agoI guess one alternative explanation would be that it's a hard problem, and Facebook doesn't know how to solve it. Or that current efforts aren't having good results. In either case, Facebook has a financial incentive to say nothing, instead of publicizing lackluster results. Or, my guess, they'd rather keep any news about the existence of this off the front pages, as broader knowledge of its existence by their (not as technically informed) advertising customers only negatively impacts Facebook. Kind of how a beachfront town wouldn't want to advertise the fact that Great White sharks exist... at all.
- mirekrusin 7y agoI don’t buy it, we’re building ai that can drive, classify scans better than professional doctors, translate - but we can’t figure out fake accounts? Come on.
- mr__y 7y agoIt's probably not that they can't classify fake accounts but that doing so at a scale requires too large resources and it's more economical to employ only simpler techniques that weed out most of the bots and live with the remaining few. Then if they also happen to anyhow benefit from the existence of those fake accounts then it becomes even harder to justify costly filters and leads to a sufficient-enough-to-not-look-obviously-weak grade filtering
- scarejunba 7y agoOr perhaps slightly more temporally related, how Vint Cerf feels about ISOC selling .org :)