
Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot - coloneltcb
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/technology/facebook-fake-accounts.html
======
menacingly
I get that facebook my have complicated motives here, but I don't know that
"easy to spot" is a good yardstick.

First, there are the countless instances where something is trivial for a
single person to suss out that doesn't scale.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, I don't think simple hunches about fake
accounts are really actionable here. Having an account that "originated in the
Middle East" that now presents as an "attractive woman" is not really a clear-
cut case for having your account terminated.

I get that we really really want to be able to draw a hard line between people
who behave in "weird" ways and organized influence attempts, but I don't think
we can get there. It's starting to sound like "bots" and "fake news" have
disagreeable opinions baked into the definition.

~~~
jmcqk6
>First, there are the countless instances where something is trivial for a
single person to suss out that doesn't scale.

This is an interesting argument to me. It's basically conceding a shittier
solution, because we "can't scale" the effective one. As we talk more and more
about automation, I think this is similar to what we've seen in meat space
with things like tools.

I've heard so many people complain about chinese hammers or socket wrenches
(though I also know there are quality chinese tools out there) or many other
examples. Things mass produced cheaply are lesser quality, but we're willing
to make the trade off as a society because we get things for cheaper.

And now we see this in the information economy. Even though we know a human
doing this work would be much more effective, we're not going to do it because
the cost is too high.

~~~
wpietri
Yes. And the way it's often argued, it treats the status quo as some sort of
natural given, like the weather. The line of argument seems to be that if
Facebook and Twitter can't run safe platforms while maintaining their current
revenue models and profit margins, well, we'll just have to live with that
lack of safety.

I find this line of argument odd when it's about actual natural givens, like
dangerous weather. I'm in a house right now, so it's not like technology to
limit the effects of dangerous weather is unheard of. And a bit odder when
it's about human inventions that have been around for generations, like guns
and cars. But when it's used for something basically new in the world? I find
it baffling.

~~~
philipwhiuk
Yes, I've always found the 'YouTube gets too much video to moderate it' a
particularly shit argument. Maybe they not be allowed to have as much content
then.

~~~
abakker
That doesn’t seem to be a useful solution, either. I mean, eat tool would you
use to manage that?

Limit total videos per website? How do you determine who gets to stay? Money?
Clicks?

Moderating all the videos is hard, but if the videos go to a different
platform, they still need that same moderation, right?

~~~
wpietri
There are plenty of ways you could do that. Off the top of my head: Every
video-posting account must be validated with, e.g., a credit card. New
accounts have clear posting limits. Accounts behaving badly get charged for
cleanup. If you want to get paid by YouTube you have to go through an
extensive validation process, including background check. If you are found to
be abusing the platform, money will be clawed back, and if you can't prove
sufficient resources to handle a clawback, you instead have to post a bond or
find an insurer who will guarantee you.

Sure, some videos may go to another platform. And for most things, that'd be
fine. A lot of videos people post on YouTube are just accidentally hosted
there, and would be just as good posted on, e.g., Facebook, Twitter, or
another personal account provider. But there's a whole class of garbage that
YouTube has because one way or another it allows people to get paid. That
garbage is a negative externality on the rest of us, and there's no particular
reason for us to allow YouTube to profit from it.

------
lostapathy
A major failing with Facebook's process for reporting accounts is that there
is no way to enter any text to help them figure it out. I have seen numerous
accounts that are breaking the TOS, but it's only obvious if you know some
other bit of easily verifiable information.

Without fail, whenever I report one of these accounts facebook tells me
"thanks but they're fine, feel free to block them if you still feel this way".
Given the limited information available, I can see why they aren't able to
kill the account, but the decision would become trivial if they would take
even one sentence of information to help explain it.

~~~
anigbrowl
They don't care anyway. A while back I got a notification that a sexually
explicit picture had been removed from my page. I had never seen the picture
in question, said so, and asked where it had been posted, as I was worried
that my account had been compromised. They completely ignored the question and
I got back a standard 'we've reviewed the picture and found it's not compliant
with our community standards' reply.

Their 'community standards' are also bullshit, of course, since the community
of users has exactly zero input into the design of said standards. People can
share video of violence and murder freely (though it may need a click-through
to view), and I'm OK with that as some imagery can be both violent and
newsworthy. But anything sexual is treated as toxic. My wife got banned for a
week sharing a photo of a statue in a museum.

Like many people, I'd really like to leave the platform but not the network of
friends that I communicate regularly with. And no, email and or other channels
are not good substitutes. Any alternative has to offer at least the same
degree of functionality/convenience to be worth using.

~~~
sverige
> Like many people, I'd really like to leave the platform but not the network
> of friends that I communicate regularly with. And no, email and or other
> channels are not good substitutes. Any alternative has to offer at least the
> same degree of functionality/convenience to be worth using.

Not picking on you specifically, but I've noticed that this is the standard
line used by people who love to complain about how shitty facebook (or
sometimes twitter or some other social media site) is, but who don't want to
vote with their feet.

I have no accounts and never have, yet magically I have been able to keep in
touch with everyone that matters in my life. I don't think I've missed out on
anything important, either. Then again, I lived a good portion of my adult
life before social media was invented, so maybe I just have some skills that a
younger generation never acquired. Or maybe just different expectations.

Seriously, this stuff has existed for just over a decade yet people act as if
they can't live without it. It makes me fear for the future health and well-
being of society.

~~~
smelendez
Facebook has existed for just over a decade but a lot of people and
institutions have already moved communications there that used to be
elsewhere. Other communications that might not have taken place at all because
of cost or other factors are now taking place on social media.

It's sometimes the only place people post to let people know they're sick or
well, in or out of danger (e.g., in the hurricanes this year), or had a major
life event. Sometimes it's impossible to get this information another way
without alarming or traumatizing someone, or tying up someone's phone line or
draining their battery during an emergency.

I've noticed some small music venues, theaters, etc. use it as their primary
place to post events.

About six years ago, I got one very good full-time job that I learned about
through a tweet--I wouldn't have thought to even check if that employer had
such a job without Twitter. I've since gotten freelance work that I only
learned about through Twitter and Facebook. (I've also gotten work through
email, Slack, Google Talk, SMS, LinkedIn, physical posters, and word of
mouth).

Lots of people use social media to vet potential dates, and see Facebook
classifieds (tied to a real identity) as safer than Craigslist, etc.

Facebook, Twitter and all have flaws and things I wish they'd change--so do my
phone company, my cable company and the postal service. But using them is a
net positive.

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devonkim
One thing I learned from my experience in security is that sometimes instantly
responding to a threat may be counterproductive because you may be reacting to
a form of a honeypot - it is used to determine whether their newest iteration
would bypass your detection or not. Similarly, large online game operators
tend to do bans for bot systems in waves rather than incrementally to avoid
signalling precisely what tipped off their systems.

I don’t know if the dynamics make sense for Facebook’s adversarial users or
not.

~~~
aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA
Agreed. Even if a given fraudulent account wasn't specifically created to be a
honeypot, promptly banning it affords the creator more time to iterate on
their method.

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why42
I can't believe this hasn't been brought up... but there is a massive conflict
of interest here. And not due to the slimy but mostly above board reasons
posted in the article.

It is deep rooted in the financial industry.

Misleading investors is not punished if you have a big business. Especially in
tech.

Facebook stands to lose or gain billions of dollars on market capitalization
based on how many people investors perceive to be on Facebook.

If Facebook is over-reporting users by any size multiple, they stand to get
billions in additional valuation. The people using fake accounts don't want to
get caught, as they make money from them.

Given the above, how can anyone realistically expect Facebook to really commit
to cleaning up fake accounts? This isn't just for Facebook.

Big business has proven to be beyond prosecution unless they engage in the
most outrageous behavior.

~~~
leggomylibro
Exactly, they have zero incentive to remove fake accounts, and several
incentives to keep them. This is all just a show on their part.

But I doubt that only 10% of facebook accounts are real.

------
rosser
Unless I missed it in skimming The Fine Article (I have a couple minutes
between standup and another meeting, so time constraints), they're overlooking
an, IMO, _obvious_ tell.

For months now, whenever I've clicked on one of the "trending" stories in the
right sidebar, I've seen a wall (not intended) of public posts that are
verbatim, to the terrible grammar and obvious non-native English speaker
phrasing, copies of one another.

If you have a bunch of accounts posting the same string of text, attached to
the same link (or even just links that are grouped together topically), maybe
those should be subject to further scrutiny as possibly being "fake"?

~~~
Stranger43
Except of cause that's also how very real grassroot movement's look especially
those not made up of American college students, i.e. you have a fairly high
chance of chance of you accidentally targeting a few thousand genuine users.

Remembering that almost all of facebooks growth potential is outside of the
US. Facebook really cannot afford to just kick off people based on not being
us college students.

The problem is that while it might be easy to find someone who diverges from
what the nytimes think the correct mainstream should be from a beltway centric
viewpoint, it's far harder to differentiate between a bot and some yahoo
posting her local mainstream view from a netcafe somewhere in Siberia.

~~~
rosser
> _...you have a fairly high chance of chance of you accidentally targeting a
> few thousand genuine users._

Which is why I said "further scrutiny", and not robo-ban.

The tone of these posts is very much, and very consistently the whole "sow
dissension" and "poke at wedge issues" shtick that is demonstrably part of how
the Russians have been meddling in our shit — and which Facebook, perhaps
knowingly, profited from. (Unless you're also suggesting that's somehow part
of the "correct... beltway centric" narrative that NYT, &c, "think" we should
have, and which is instead some kind of false-flag, psy-ops disinfo campaign —
in which case, never mind; please don't waste my time further.)

As your sibling comment describes them, they so often have a feel of "Markov
chain gibberish", and not just "not being us college students" or "someone who
diverges from what the nytimes think the correct mainstream should be".

EDIT: Parenthetical.

~~~
Stranger43
The college student problem is btw a very real concern in social science i.e.
way to many studies have been made using local college students as study
subjects, which is useless in a world where the average person speaks bad
English and think the US is the biggest threat to world peace(however wrong
that view might be). I.E. you cannot and should not build your algorithm about
what is normal for your local but have to look at data that might not be
available to people other then Facebook.

Foreign influence is a reality in every single election, worldwide, to the
point where nobody have even accused Russia of doing something that the US
would be comfortable making illegal when it comes to US based organizations
interacting with foreign nations.

The problem is that the entire debate starts from an obsolete(fake past) view
on how interstate relations work in the modern world where the diplomatic corp
plays the only major role, where as the reality is that with the modern
Internet traditional diplomacy have given way to a much more direct people to
people interaction meaning that you cannot just assume that a post being
foreign and exposing a viewpoint that's not organic to the beltway are the
product of state controlled a botnet, it might be a foreign movement deciding
to engage in modern direct diplomacy.

And Facebook cannot grow while remaining an US centric platform so the
commercial drive for facebook is to become the facilitator of direct people to
people diplomacy rather then a defender of the old diplomatic model as some
American politicians obviously want them to be.

And if you cannot use content or "national style" as a guide to spot bots you
have to depend almost entirely of metadata about the IP or client involved
especially as false positives based on content analysis have a potential for
market backlash.

~~~
rosser
I'm talking about literally _dozens_ of verbatim-identical posts on known-
divisive issues, from different accounts in different cities — or even
countries, though many-to-most of them are already in the US, mitigating so
much of your counter-argument — and specifically _not_ the viewpoint they're
espousing (except insofar as that viewpoint tends, "with a probability
approaching unity", to be driving an extant sociocultural or political wedge
further in). This is about form, not content. You really need to understand
that or we're talking _past_ one another, and this conversation is moot.

For another example of what I'm talking about, I saw a video a couple of
holiday shopping seasons ago, that showed clips from local newscast after
local newscast, from dozens of TV stations across the country, all prattling
on — verbatim — about how you should "buy _yourself_ a gift this Christmas!"
It's a manipulation, that no-one not seeing the broadcasts from multiple
markets will ever notice, because they never see another market's telecast.

Obviously, if Facebook can aggregate these posts well enough to present them
on a single "trending story" feed, they can damned well perform the step
further analysis to check whether they're dropping verbatim posts, and whether
there's anything else hinky about the accounts submitting those identical
posts. These accounts, if they're fake, are being used to sow disinformation
and dissension. They are _not_ dialogue or diplomacy, let alone "direct people
to people interaction".

Facebook's "right" to grow in non-US markets is completely orthogonal to that,
and also — IMO — way less important than, you know, "a functioning democracy."

EDIT: phrasing.

~~~
Stranger43
If you have to defend democracy by restricting one if it's foundational
pillars what are you really defending.

I am not arguing the problem of money/power being used to amplify speech is
not real i am arguing that it's something we have to deal with as a part of
how real world democracies works when it's not constrained by an Jacobin state
where the media have to abide by a very narrow set of standards for what can
be reprinted defined by someone who don't really answers to nobody. And it's
sure as hell not limited to Russia.

Fake news and media manipulation really isn't a new problem, Hearst and
Pulitzer used to make their living from soving dissent and and anger, and we
call those days the golden age of journalism, we have an multi trillion dollar
advertising industry that does nothing but manipulate people into doing
things/buying things they might not have done otherwise. Not to mention the
circus of day to day politics in pretty much every democratic state.

The notion that democracy needed to be protected by a powerful benevolent
central committee(with universal authority and no restrictions) is in many way
what separated communist from socialists back when the old European empires
fell apart, and new systems had to be created, and while the communist states
did hold out far better then many democratic socialist states it was not an
particularly attractive society for anyone to live in.

We live in a world of 6 billion people most of them in a partially shared
economy so for the US to have to live with foreign people interfering in us
elections is not anti-democratic it's widening the definition of demos to
everyone affected by a election, just as the US public itself reserves the
right to try and influence foreign elections.

------
jokoon
By "policing fake accounts" they also mean "hunt down real accounts who don't
use their real name, and ask for a scan of your ID".

~~~
cddotdotslash
I understand the distinction, but how do we expect them to do both? If they
can't enforce a real-name policy (by backing it up with required ID) then how
can they possibly remove fake accounts which often use fake names?

~~~
jokoon
Just watch account behavior, IP addresses... There are many real users who
don't use their names for good reasons. Fake accounts are also used for false
clicks, which facebook doesn't mind.

And by the way, there are no way to really know if a name is real or not.

Im just saying facebook use the real name requirement excuse... but there are
other ways to fight fake accounts.

------
cryptoz
A real shocker for me is how little the big tech companies are using their AI
powers for defensive purposes. Each smart-project they undertake to detect
your friends in your photos and identify cats in pictures is done for a
directly profitable feature. But with Twitter and Facebook both getting caught
letting foreign actors buy political ads and use fake personas to influence
the population, it seems like an existential risk to them. Wouldn't it be wise
to direct some of this work to detecting fake accounts, providing an _honest_
experience to users and being more honest overall?

Yeah, Twitter and Facebook would show slower growth numbers. But they would
become respectable and sustainable for society, which seems massively more
valuable financially in the long run.

~~~
ravenstine
Could that be a sign that current AI is not as intellgient as tech blogs
suggest?

~~~
tzakrajs
And that AI is a bubble within a bubble?

------
IronWolve
Facebook and twitter have many criminal organizations cat fishing people for
money and black mail. Its larger problem that should be tackled than botnets
posting memes. (IMHO)

------
1024core
What if this "Kevin Eversely" character had actually immigrated from Macedonia
to Minneapolis? Just because many of your friends are not from your region, by
itself doesn't mean anything.

~~~
twothamendment
Right - one odd thing alone isn't enough. I worked on a platform that allowed
contributors sign up and provide content from their area. A user provided some
fishy content with a very heavy slant so I started looking into his profile.
The big thing that really confirmed we were on to something was his profile
photo was one of a retired athlete. Busted by tineye.com. Once we dug in some
more we found it was a local politician writing under a fake name.

So yes, having all your friends in another area doesn't mean you are a fake,
but it may be an easy thing to look for that flags the account for more
inspection.

------
nmstoker
This needs care, but I don't see why they can't just rate limit key activity
from high risk accounts that are reported, then let the person carry on. If
they're genuine then things like friend requests will get accepted but if
they're fake, those will get a poor response and seal their fate.

Simple: earn trust through good behaviour. And it's not too heavy handed for
the false positives.

------
olivermarks
Facebook's login page encourages you to set up a new account ('always free')
despite their knowing you have an account.

Makes me wonder how many sock puppets and variants there are out there.
Regarding 'Russia' surely we should be saying 'Eastern European Gangsters?'
rather than a nation state...

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
I wonder how much of the problem would be eliminated if Facebook accounts had
a 1 time $5.00 set up fee?

I'd definitely be willing to pay a 1 time fee for a 90%+ reduction in fake
accounts.

~~~
skinnymuch
But the vast majority of people wouldn't be happy about that at all. Even if
most people ended up paying, the loss FB would take in trust and reputation
from users would be catastrophic.

Even Whatsapp usually seen as a great startup in their growth and
sustainability never charged more than a fraction of their user base the $1
fee.

------
jbverschoor
Well. I've reported dozens of fake accounts.

All of them were "REAL" according to FB. I stopped reporting. They can have
their fake accounts.

------
fredgrott
question Can any Social Platform claim to police bot accounts when receiving
investment money from the same exact forces doing the bot accounts? Seems to
me that their is a bigger problem than just the fake accounts..no?

------
glial
Who would have guessed that the first large-scale achievement re: the Turing
Test would have happened on Facebook. We are watching bots be confused with
humans and vice versa on an enormous scale.

------
lwis
Yet I've contacted them twice about a fake profile which they've refused to
remove despite passport and driving license evidence.

Does anyone know of a better channel through which to pursue this?

~~~
ProAm
Honestly who cares if there are fake accounts (as a user). If you are an
investor I could possibly see interest, but even then who really cares as long
as facebook looks like its big and still growing that's all that matters.

------
rb2018
Facebook can just charge 1$ per sign-up and the problem is gone (faking credit
cards etc does not scale).

Of course, as others have said, they prefer having more "users".

~~~
dymk
Are you honestly suggesting that requiring having a credit card is in any way
a solution to fake accounts? That's a ridiculous proposition not just for
Facebook, but any service that operates in developing areas or serves users
under the age of 18.

------
diogenescynic
They won’t admit they have a fake account problem because it would admit they
been selling ads to bots and ripping off their advertisers. Too bad it’s true.

~~~
thecollate
I just boosted couple of posts on Facebook. Every single one of them had likes
from Bangladeshi click farms. I am not even kidding. Each of the likes had
western sounding name with about 30 friends all of who were posting in Bengali
language.

I am not sure if Silicon Valley show got the idea from Facebook or otherway
around.

------
erjjones
Crowd source this problem. Add a report fake account option. If so many (x)
number of different IP address, etc. report it, sandbox that account. Simple.

~~~
aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA
Then what happens?

If I were the adversary, I would respond by dedicating a fraction of my fake
accounts to reporting thousands of random Facebook users. Gum up the system.

------
craterdude
will they also be removing U.S. propaganda bots, or just foreign ones?

~~~
ngsekar
may be

------
Mc_Big_G
Fuck Facebook. Delete your account. A corporation's singular goal is to
maximize profits, by definition. That's exactly what they've done by taking
Russian money and using it to influence our elections. If you want justice,
it's simple. Delete your account and don't use any Facebook services. Then we
need laws regarding political "ads" and the internet, in addition to a lot of
other changes our system obviously needs. Facebook will fight change as long
as it affect their bottom line.

~~~
briandear
Hilary Clinton spent more on her wardrobe than the Russians spent on Facebook.
It was roughly $160k. Hardly enough to influence an election when campaigns
spent close to a billion dollars.

