
Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled - tooba
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48380504
======
chiefalchemist
> "During that six-month period, Facebook removed more than three billion fake
> accounts - more than ever before.

More than seven million "hate speech" posts were removed, also a record high."

Any sense of context here? For example, seven million might be a raw record
high, but of how many total posts would be far more telling.

Same for fake accounts. Is that rate up? Down? Was there a time when FB wasn't
as vigilant (perhaps to inflate its user base figures)? Is there a smoking gun
for the SEC here?

~~~
bArray
I suspect a significant number of posts removed for "hate speech" could have
been people sharing videos/documents related to the Christchurch terrorist
attack. It depends on the definition of a post and whether the BBC
interpretted Facebook's message correctly. The number 1.5 million gets thrown
around a lot [1]. I also heard the value 4 million, but cannot find the
source. If that's true, then I imagine the details of other such attacks were
also suppressed.

[1] [https://www.engadget.com/2019/04/24/facebook-christchurch-
vi...](https://www.engadget.com/2019/04/24/facebook-christchurch-videos-ai/)

~~~
wolco
I know family members who will report posts between each other as hate speech
when they are fighting and calling each other names.

~~~
Scoundreller
And sometimes you see something that is an obvious scam/spam, and you figure
it will get reviewed faster if labelled “hate speech”.

Just like needing technical support, so you call sales instead.

Or when you say you’re going to cancel just so you “unlock” the retention
deals.

Such is the MBA league game of modern life.

------
rwmj
They didn't catch the 3 fake profiles I set up on Facebook. I've not used them
for five or more years, but I checked recently and they are still there and
still let me log in without so much as a "where you been". They all have
obviously fake names and were used only for testing advertising at various
times in the past.

~~~
forgotmypw
They did, however, "catch" my Instagram account, which was only used by a
human (me).

Since posting is not possible without installing the app, I never posted
anything, but I did have a profile picture, followed accounts, and commented
on posts.

Then, one day, I tried to log in, and it was gone. Email address not
recognized in password reset. No trace of any kind.

So long, Instagram.

~~~
adventured
> Since posting is not possible without installing the app, I never posted
> anything

You can post from eg desktop Chrome, without using the app. I routinely do
this since I don't like installing FB apps on my phone. I often edit photos on
my desktop prior to uploading, so it's just plain convenient.

Sign in on the desktop with Chrome. Go to your default home page (the person
body icon). Right mouse click -> inspect page.

At the top, change the page to responsive, and set something like eg 680x680
as the dimensions for the page (you can drag resize to different dimensions).
Now reload the page. It will present the standard mobile interface bar at the
bottom of the page, including the ability to upload images (the plus icon
within a box).

~~~
wolco
Would resizing the window smaller do the same?

~~~
jobigoud
Haven't tested but moving to resposive might trigger a user agent change.

Can the same be done on FF?

~~~
333c
Firefox has a mode where you can choose from a dropdown of phone/tablet types,
and it will set your user agent and screen size appropriately. I believe it's
called "Responsive Design Mode."

~~~
jobigoud
That worked, thanks.

Dev tools > Responsive Design Mode in the top right, then back on the main
page, selected a phone model. I had to reload the page for it to show the
phone version of the site.

------
anonymous5133
I never knew how many fake profiles exist on facebook until I tried to buy a
$10 amazon gift card with paypal in one of the groups I was joined. I missed
all the red flags. First, the profile was an attractive female with little
account activity. Second, when I tried to send the paypal payment it defaulted
to PHP currency (Philippines money) even though the seller said they lived in
the United States. Third, the account was non-us unverified. Then when the
person actually did scam me, they immediately deleted the profile.

Needless to say, that was the last time I trusted random people on facebook.

~~~
thatoneuser
What was this scam?

~~~
yyy888sss
There are groups (on Discord, Facebook) where people sell Amazon gift card
codes for less than the value of the gift card. Sometimes they are real codes
that have been bought with accounts that have been hacked through email
phishing, and sometimes they are completely fake.

~~~
whenchamenia
Yup, buddy had his amazon account banned for using such cards. His gf, who
orders 10 things a day from there, and shared the account, was not impressed.

------
dredmorbius
In the months prior to the Google+ shutdown, I took several pulls of the full
listing of Communities on the site via sitemaps files. Though not the same
level of detail as profiles, this produced interesting results.

The total net number of communities was increasing by about 1 percent per
month (80,000 communites added). At the same time, about four thousand
communities per day were being removed (unavailable when queried in the 24
hours following the sitemaps pull), or 120,000/mo. Total (gross, not net) new
community creation rate was quite high: 200,000/mo.

This continued until new community creation was disabled in February 2019, in
advance of the site shutdown. Total communities numbered over 8.1 million at
final count.

[https://joindiaspora.com/posts/13767351](https://joindiaspora.com/posts/13767351)

A pretty considerable level of churn.

------
pesenti
The actual report:

[https://transparency.facebook.com/community-standards-
enforc...](https://transparency.facebook.com/community-standards-
enforcement#fake-accounts)

Fake accounts are estimated to represent 5% of all monthly active users.

~~~
Tempest1981
Another important excerpt:

"The majority of these accounts were caught within minutes of registration,
before they became a part of our monthly active user (MAU) population."

For MUA, recent news said "Facebook now serves 2.37 billion monthly active
users". And 5% of that is "only" 120 million.

------
nxpnsv
I wonder how I make my inactive account look fake so they will cull it
properly...

~~~
amelius
Start a campaign to quit Facebook collectively, and they'll ban you. A first
step could be to change your profile picture into a "quit facebook" icon.

~~~
whenchamenia
Any proof this works?

------
alexpetralia
To what degree are advertisers aware that the profiles which see their ads may
not be genuine users?

I suspect they either don't know, or have no alternatives.

~~~
wesammikhail
Advertisers simply don´t know. The reason most of them don´t know is because
there are virtually no tools available that can distinguish between a real
user and a fake user. Only FB can make that assessment with some degree of
certainty and even that can´t be trusted. External partners have been given a
choice: either advertise at the risk of it being some garbage traffic, or not
advertise at all. And for obvious reasons, the latter is what people choose to
do.

~~~
randallsquared
> either advertise at the risk of it being some garbage traffic, or not
> advertise at all. And for obvious reasons, the latter is what people choose
> to do.

Do you mean "the former"? 'Cause, you know, there are still ads.

~~~
wesammikhail
yes sorry, I had a brain fart when I wrote that!

------
Doubl
I haven't got a Facebook account. If I did set one up it would probably be
with a fake identity. I've sometimes been tempted because it would help with
signing up in lots of other places. But Facebook (or Gavin as the Swype on my
phone keeps calling it!) would probably figure out who I was anyway. And the
thought of that creeps me out.

------
jug
Holy moly! I thought FB only had that many users to begin with. When FB
announces user counts I assume they include bots to bolster the numbers and
only a few years back the number was ~1 billion??

~~~
darkwizard42
You might be confusing their reported numbers with total inactive accounts.
They regularly report their Monthly Active Users which have been >1B recently.

~~~
jobigoud
I was confused in the same way and thought the 2B+ accounts figure usually
reported was total accounts.

So how many accounts, active or inactive, bots or humans, are there in total?

~~~
darkwizard42
Don’t think they publicly reveal this as I’m not sure it’s relevant or
important to investors/advertisers.

~~~
whenchamenia
It is very relevant. It just looks very bad when you see the actual numbers.

------
mettamage
Well fortunately they didn't catch my account. And I'm happy they didn't. My
fake account allows me to:

1\. Login to websites that I don't want to share my actual contacts to but
just my real name (my fake account has my real name and my real account a
fake-ish name so that I can't be Googled too easily).

2\. Disable that annoying wall by not having a lot of friends.

3\. Be part of meaningful groups (only 1 so far), because my friends know that
I have this fake account with a real name.

4\. Amazing account for demo purposes when I was working at a coding school.

5\. My fake account is setup on auto login on my primary browser, so if I type
"fa" and press enter, I feel bored by the empty wall and very tiny friends
list, instead of engaged. My main account is auto-logged in to messenger, so
that's where I go now.

~~~
Doubl
I'd be betting that they are going after huge blocks of fake accounts that
they can link together somehow. Someone like you with a single fake account,
they'll live with. They probably know that's so and so's other account. He
likes to use that one on his PC. ;-)

------
dawhizkid
The CNN interview that aired today with some FB exec on this issue was such a
cringe-worthy disaster. Could not answer why they made the decision to delete
these profiles but would not delete a fake video of Pelosi slowed down meant
to make her look drunk or stupid. It was wild.

------
eyeareque
Did fb refund all of the ad money spend on these accounts? Let me guess: No.

------
b_tterc_p
0.02% of content viewed is terrorist propaganda or child sexual abuse.
Multiply that by 100 pieces of content per day, and 365 days per year and you
get 7 pieces of terrorist propaganda and child sex abuse per year. I wonder
how focused it is on specific individuals or if it’s broadly random. I also
wonder if rates of terrorist propaganda are much higher among individuals the
propaganda is trying to target.

Edit: that is, the base rate of 2 / 10000 pieces of content being terrorist
propaganda is perhaps 0 / 10000 for 99% of users and 200 / 10000 for 1% of
users.

------
throwaway94843
Facebook has laughably weak moderation.

Twitter, despite having stricter moderation (which seldom seems to result in
consequences), seems to have an even bigger problem. An election in a certain
country (I'm wary of even mentioning the name of that country, lest I be
bombarded) exposed a huge army of dubious accounts shutting down dissent.

In another country, a network of Twitter bots attempted to start a race war.

Then there are the 100k+ follower accounts that seem to get away with blatant
incitement and rule-breaking, and Twitter is too afraid of a backlash to shut
them down, even when they admit to having multiple admins (something that
should disqualify them from the blue checkmark).

WhatsApp seems to be an even more pernicious vector of viral garbage...why it
doesn't disable forwarding entirely (or forwarding to groups) remains a
mystery.

It isn't an SV phenomenon: in another recent election, WeChat was used to
spread fake electoral propaganda.

It may be time, for the sake of democracy, and stability in the world to "de-
platform" the platforms entirely. The other option would be for remorseful
founders to allow them to be swamped with spam (it might provide plausible
deniability to shareholders), and be killed off that way.

~~~
udfalkso
Moderation is an extremely hard problem to deal with well. Have you ever
attempted to manage a community?

~~~
zxcb1
There are over two billion people on there. How about paying their users for
finding and reporting content? A reputation system to find and pay trustworthy
people to clean up. Thereby delegating the task back to the scale where it
belongs, some money and incentives too.

~~~
panarky
I've been thinking about a online bounty hunter service to do exactly this.

Next step - how to prevent Sybil accounts created by the bounty hunters from
generating new mal-content on an industrial scale for bounty hunters to
identify for reward.

------
threeseed
During the recent Australian election there were a number of Facebook
advertisements by political figures which were completely false e.g. Labor
party imposing a death tax. And given that the election result was pretty
close it could've easily have made a difference.

So I couldn't care less whether Facebook culled 3 billion profiles or not.
What I need is for Facebook to make the hard choice and stop allowing
political advertising on their platform. It's almost single handedly
undermining democracy around the world.

~~~
criley2
Even without political advertising, the amount of fake news spread in Groups
in the form of memes and images is absolutely fracking staggering.

If you go through the facebook feed of a conservative facebook user in their
50s+, you quite literally will see all lies and propaganda, and nothing real
(for one ex: see the horribly faked Nancy Pelosi video that spread like
wildfire yesterday, despite it's obvious fakeness). I'm not being hyperbolic,
it's literally all "fake news". It's a completely shocking problem to have but
the current state of politics is that there are a lot of people whose media
diet consists of mainly of fake facebook group posts.

There is no viable solution either. If you democratize the printing press/mass
media so far that every single person can print whatever they want whenever
they want to, you will get this race to the bottom where absolute bullshit
beats out hard truths every time. Lies getting around the world before the
truth is out the door and all that. (Also the reality that this is clickbait x
1000, it's not a business picking articles that drive revenue, it's bad
political actors picking stories that drive unrest).

Facebook isn't salvageable. It's destroying democracy around the world and
there is nothing that can be done to fix it. I see not just correlation but
causation between the rise of facebook and the rise of the fake news fueled
far-right that is destroying modern democracy around the world.

(And it's no surprise that with each declassified DoJ report, we learn of yet-
another-nation-state running these fake news groups with the explicit
intention to subvert democracy and increase civil unrest).

Please delete Facebook before it's too late.

~~~
bluedino
>> If you go through the facebook feed of a conservative facebook user in
their 50s+, you quite literally will see all lies and propaganda,

There are no lies or fake memes for the left?

~~~
criley2
I didn't say that, but in order to prevent a "whatabout" or "false
equivalence" attack, I will state up front: Conservatives are more likely to
create, spread and fall for fake news than liberals.

[https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586)

"Conservatives were more likely to share articles from fake news domains,
which in 2016 were largely pro-Trump in orientation, than liberals or
moderates"

We can speculate as to why. In my opinion, anti-intellectualism is far more
virulent on the right than left. Nearly every single left-leaning politician
is pro-science and accepts the scientific consensus on a broad range of
issues. Conversely, most conservative politicians are anti-science, reject
scientific consensus on a broad array of subjects, and consistently parrot
mythology in its place. In fact it has become extremely common for
conservatives to dislike and distrust higher education, academia, and research
all together. It is a common trope in conservative media to attack scientific
research as "pointless" and "expensive" and to use religious leaders to
discuss intellectual or scientific topics.

Any ideology which preaches anti-intellectualism and mythology over science,
evidence, etc, is necessarily more vulnerable to being co-opted in other
evidenceless subjects.

~~~
mythrwy
There is plenty of anti-science thinking in certain camps of the left as well.

Phone radiation, GMOs, nuclear power, dietary trends, mushrooms are conscious,
the list of foo is pretty long if you look. Along with the anti-math, anti-
logic, anti-historical evidence view of economics.

But I don't disagree there is a fair amount of right wing kookage spread
about. Perhaps more than it's left wing counterpart.

For a long time I didn't really believe the "right wing" fake news thing was
real. I'd never actually seen it. Then I visited my father in law who
breathlessly informed us at dinner Obama was going to jail as they had proved
his birth certificate was fake! Curious I looked at his facebook feed and
almost fell over, it was almost all fake news right wing straight out of a
parallel universe and really obviously nonsense for the most part. I don't
know where he even found that stuff. So ya, it does happen. And I say that as
a person who is very much not a leftist (nor a facebook user).

For whatever it's worth, I like to think of myself as a member of the "do what
makes sense party". But we have few members and no groundswell and no formal
organization it appears. Sadly.

~~~
stephenr
Being anti-nuclear doesn’t mean you’re anti-science, nor does questioning the
value/cost/results of GMO foods.

~~~
repolfx
Indeed not, but I think maybe that's the point. There are lots of cases where
you can disagree with the scientific consensus without being "anti-science",
whatever that means.

Basically all scientific or logical analysis about power generation yields a
pro-nuclear conclusion and thus anti-nuclear campaigners tend to make
arguments about priorities rather than claim their opponents are anti-science;
they argue the risks are underestimated, the costs of waste are too high etc.

As for GMO foods, again, the scientific consensus is there are no health
problems with them, which is why the anti-GMO argument tends to be of the form
"but what if they're just so super long term problems that we haven't seen
them yet" (a.k.a. the EU's precautionary principle on blocking GMO foods from
competing with EU farmers).

Look at it the other way around - lots of climate change skeptics make deeply
scientific arguments, typically pointing out errors or mistakes in papers,
cases of previous predictions that turned out to be false and so on. That
doesn't make them anti-science, it arguably makes them campaigners for better
science.

~~~
stephenr
> Basically all scientific or logical analysis about power generation yields a
> pro-nuclear conclusion

What's the scientific analysis that says power plants have on average cost a
metric fuck ton more to clean up than was ever expected or planned for, or
that there is still no effective plan to get rid of the waste they produce?

See this is my point. I can admit that _some_ scientists are no doubt pro-
nuclear, and pro-GMO.

But you apparently can't admit that there are scientists who don't believe one
or both of those things is net positive.

~~~
repolfx
Remember that fossil fuel burning power plants also generate a ton of waste
and nobody has a realistic plan to clean that up either (beyond CO2 extraction
or geo-engineering, neither of which are more plausible than nuclear waste
containment).

It's easy to argue nuclear power sucks when compared to a theoretical ideal.
When compared to forms of power that dump their problematic waste into the
atmosphere where it's nearly impossible to get back, having the nasty stuff
conveniently packed into cylinders, ready for dropping into the continental
shelf, doesn't seem like such a bad deal.

~~~
stephenr
> when compared to a theoretical ideal.

Renewable energy is not theoretical.

> nasty stuff conveniently packed into cylinders, ready for dropping into the
> continental shelf

Your plan for highly radioactive waste is to put it in canisters and drop them
into the ocean.. sure, what could possibly go wrong?

------
angel_j
This is a joke. The punchline is everybody's fake on social media.

~~~
baq
true, doesn't make it any better though.

------
tyingq
_" Facebook removed more than three billion fake accounts - more than ever
before."_

Oy. How do you justify letting this issue fester that long / to that degree?
How is that not an unprecedented mea culpa?

Edit: I'll risk the HN "downvoting not discussed mantra" for this. BILLIONS of
active fake accounts is a core competency failure, full stop. World population
is single digit billions...give me a break.

~~~
Shish2k
Facebook could be ~100% accurate at separating real and fake accounts if they
exchanged data with the government to make sure that every user had a passport
/ social security number / other equivalent associated with their account. Is
that the world we want to live in?

~~~
onion2k
That would only be 100% accurate if the government approved ID was perfectly
secure, and no one ever leaked databases of those personal details. Tens of
millions of passport and social security numbers are already out in the wild.

~~~
9HZZRfNlpR
How to make it secure? Estonian and Scandinavian countries have chip on them
that a computer can read, but it's for doing gov and banking stuff. You can
always fake a photo, they don't have much to compare it against to. At some
point FB started to verify profiles actively, I didn't use my own name or took
part of any political/marketing mumbo jumbo, but I quickly photoshopped an id
with the fake name using a sample ID as a blueprint and the human moderator
left me alone.

------
klim_bim
Facebook = AOL + geocities. Long live Search.

