
On the hunt for Facebook’s army of fake likes - sjmurdoch
https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2016/05/12/on-the-hunt-for-facebooks-army-of-fake-likes/
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aandon
Product manager at fraud detection company Simility here. I'm very surprised
Facebook hasn't put more effort into curbing fake accounts, makes me think
it's very low priority for them. We have social network customers who are much
smaller than FB, yet have gotten their fake account rates far below FB's.

One effective strategy we've employed not mentioned here is category mapping:
if an account of type A, only targets accounts of type B for likes (especially
if they ignore categories C, D, etc.), this is usually a high indicator of
fraud. For example, one very common strategy is to create a fake account for
an attractive female to friend many male accounts (especially relatively new
accounts unaware of these tactic). This can be easily detected by analyzing
the gender and account age of all targets and coming up with a diversity
score. Low diversity score = likely fraudster.

~~~
lbrandy
Hi. I worked on Facebook's anti-abuse infrastructure for awhile (I'm still at
Facebook, but working on different things now). So while I didn't personally
fight spam/fake accounts, I worked closely with those who did. I'll be blunt:
based on this and your other comments, you don't know what you're talking
about.

I'll go a step further and give you some unsolicited advice. The anti-abuse
community amongst internet/game/tech companies is actually fairly close knit
since it's one of the few places where everyone is on the same side and lots
of "secrets" are shared (including, even, at the spam fighting conference we
organized last year). I would bet a lot of people just rolled their eyes while
learning of your company for the first time. You're already entangled in one
argument from someone calling you on this silliness, but I assure they're not
alone. I'd probably suggest reconsidering this approach.

~~~
aandon
Indeed I know it's a close-knit community. Most of our 20-person team came
from anti-fraud teams at Google. I'm guessing the "silliness" you're referring
to is the talk of Facebook not being incentivized to block spammers. I think
kbenson articulated best what I was trying to say, that there are tradeoffs in
blocking good users and decreasing apparent user volume when fighting fraud.
Facebook would obviously not be wise to catch every single fraudster because
there would be a high number of false positives, so a balance must be struck.
As I'm sure you know, fraud teams at many companies often clash with the
marketing team because they're protecting the bottom line (sometimes at the
expense of the top line) respectively, and vice versa.

~~~
Wagthesam
I worked at a company with a spam variable in the backend. 0 for eliminating
most spam engagement actions like likes. 1 for letting all spam in.

We didn't set it to 0.

There's sometimes positive value in spam. Ex Instagram users get a boost when
their pictures are liked, by someone real or not.

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Aelinsaar
Is this a matter of, "And now they'll change those patterns", or is this
something that can be generalized regardless of how the fakes change their
posting styles? The last lines of the article suggests to me that the answer
is something like: This isn't going to work out in the world, only in the lab.

~~~
tyingq
The article mentions that services already exist that are stealthy enough to
fly under the radar:

 _" The issue with these methods, however, is that stealthier (and more
expensive) like farms — which likely do not rely on fake/compromised accounts
— can successfully circumvent them, as a result of spreading likes over longer
timespans and liking popular pages to mimic normal users. Our recent
preliminary study confirms this hypothesis on accounts used by BoostLikes.com,
showing that tools similar to those deployed by Facebook (which rely on graph
co-clustering) fail to accurately detect fraud."_

~~~
Aelinsaar
So in essence, this is just going to slightly alter the landscape in terms of
which of these services gets the money and the clients.

~~~
tyingq
I think it just drives the cost per like up. I suppose there may be some
threshold where the price is higher than the benefit, so perhaps that's the
goal?

~~~
Aelinsaar
Good point, and it probably doesn't have to get too high for it to become
prohibitive.

------
lucasmullens
I've had to go out of my way to tell several of my friends now that their
account is liking spam posts. The worst part is they don't know it's
happening, since they don't see posts their account is liking.

The posts getting liked are from fan pages with <5 likes, yet the post gets
10,000 likes within minutes. Is there some reason that isn't easily
detectable?

------
Yhippa
I get one legitimate Facebook friend request for 20 fake ones. Would be nice
if Facebook was better at detecting and pruning these people.

Same goes for their other product, Instagram. I want people to find my
pictures I post on there but the amount of notifications I get not from
interactions but from spam accounts adding me and liking my photos is very
annoying.

~~~
dimino
That's interesting, because I get maybe 1 fake Facebook friend request per
year?

I think a lot of the problems people have with Facebook are based in how
Facebook gets used. If you have 400 friends, you're simply not getting the
same experience out of Facebook as a person with 60 friends is getting.

~~~
cgriswald
> That's interesting, because I get maybe 1 fake Facebook friend request per
> year?

I get a few more than that, but the pattern is always the same. Profile
picture is of an arguably attractive girl and we have a mutual friend. The
mutual friend, in my case, is always one of a few guys who historically hasn't
done well with women.

------
Cozumel
I've paid for fake likes on my FB pages, the reason was no-one liked them when
no-one else did, so it was just to get the ball rolling. As far as I could
tell they all seemed to be genuine accounts in Turkey.

------
dilemma
Facebook in many ways want to have and benefit from fake accounts and fake
engagement.

They're not really selling advertising, they're selling KPIs. Facebook is the
best platform because they deliver the best KPIs and so get a larger
proportion of ad spend.

Think about this: Company spends $X on digital branding campaign, then to make
sure they can justify it to bosses etc. they spend $Y to get the views to go
with the spend. Did customers benefit from or like the campaign? That's
besides the point. Companies essentially pay people to watch their videos
(AutoPlay in their FB feed).

------
tn13
Fake likes is not a problem as long the Fake v/s Genuine ratio is stable. It
automatically gets factored-in in the cost per thousand impressions for
marketeers. It is pretty much like emails. If you get 1% CTR to double your
conversions you need to send twice the email volume.

However if that ratio is not stable then I think it will be a serious problem
for marketeers because we would not have any metric to determine how much
budget we should scale.

This is the reason I suspect FB is going slow on the killing the fake likes.
Their strategy will manifest over much longer period than usual.

------
peteretep
And yet 50% of my Instagram interactions seem to be spam

~~~
tmaly
go and read some of the affiliate marketing forums. Instagram is being abused
more than you would guess. People are talking about getting a million
followers on there etc and selling shutouts. I barely use Instagram anymore,
and I enjoy photography.

~~~
rconti
Can't you just... only follow people you know and like? (other than the ads,
of course). I use instagram sporadically, and can't really say I have any
problems with the abuse mentioned.

~~~
peteretep
The spam takes the form of people commenting generic words on all your posts,
and their profiles are full of spam.

------
spiznnx
Is it in Facebook's best interest to find and delete fake accounts? Fake
accounts clicking on ads makes Facebook money (maybe not in the long run).

~~~
artemisyna
I would think yes. If they didn't, why would an advertiser spend money with
them, knowing full well that part of it was being thrown away on fakes?

~~~
x3n0ph3n3
It could just as easily be said that it's in Facebook's interest to _appear_
to want to find and delete fake accounts. As long as their customers
(advertisers) believe click fraud is being addressed, Facebook wins.

------
shanacarp
My stupid question.

If i changed the language of my fake accounts in response to this, would they
perform better because they now no longer work in your filter?

------
onion2k
I looked at 10,000 toy bricks and they were all green so I can say with great
confidence that "All toy bricks are green."

That's an example inductive reasoning. It's _quite_ flawed as a way of
extrapolating from known information in to the unknown because it doesn't
account for the things you don't know. In the same way, saying "Fake Facebook
accounts post with _this frequency_ or _these few words_ " doesn't work,
because it only considers the accounts that do. It can't detect the bots that
don't.

~~~
dimino
Inductive reasoning is how the scientific method works, however.

"I've run 10,000 experiments that show toy bricks are green, therefore I can
say with great confidence that all toy bricks are green."

Knowing things with absolute certainty is _super_ hard.

~~~
kbenson
The point is not that you can't trust your results, it's that you can't
extrapolate a theory about _all_ toy bricks unless you know you are seeing a
representative sample of all bricks.

"I've run 10,000 experiments that show toy bricks _I found on the ground_ are
green, therefore I can say with great confidence that all toy bricks are
green." What about bricks in the toy chest? What if someone was building
something green before you tested?

As this applies to Facebook's statement, all they can assert is that they've
found a way to detect fake Facebook accounts that they've tested against the
accounts they've been able to ascertain are fake. What about the fake accounts
they could not confirm were fake, or that weren't identified in any way?

~~~
cgriswald
I have no idea what statement you're referring to in particular since it's not
in the article and you haven't cited anything.

Facebook is looking at tackling farming. In that context, the vast majority of
accounts are likely to be operated in the same way. They need to avoid
detection and they need to do it as efficiently as possible in order to make
the most profit. Facebook has now cracked this particular code and an arms
race is likely to ensue. But at the moment Facebook discovered this, it was
unlikely there were a significant number of farming operations doing things
any differently.

No one is claiming this applies to _all_ fake accounts (or if they are, it's
definitely not in the article). Obviously a catfishing account will be run
quite differently than a farming account.

~~~
kbenson
I referring to the title of the _submission_ (notable because it's not the
title of the _article_ , which is against HN guidelines), which is currently
"Fake Facebook accounts can be detected by when they post and the vocabulary
used". I assume the top-level comment was referring to that as well. My
comment up-thread was really mean to address that while it's true that knowing
things with absolute certainty is hard, that shouldn't excuse us from making
sure our claims aren't overly broad given the experiment and results.

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Sarkie
Would the title of this get flagged?

~~~
dang
We reverted the title to the article's because it was neither misleading nor
linkbait, and so by the HN guidelines shouldn't have been changed.

(The submitted title was "Fake Facebook accounts can be detected by when they
post and the vocabulary used".)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

