
Facebook says it will act against 'information operations' using false accounts - allthebest
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-propaganda-response-idUSKBN17T2G6
======
glangdale
I wish someone would create a branch of mathematics related to the study of
relationships between a bunch of "nodes" and "edges".

Jokes aside - and I'm aware that the FB folks have plenty of good graph
theorists - how hard can it be to spot these kind of non-organic actors in the
social graph? If I'm paranoid, I would guess that there's probably little
distinction between FB's valued corporate customers and advertisers and these
'information operations' in terms of their presence in the social graph.

In any case, it seems like you could do a lot of worthy stuff to distinguish
between content that spreads relatively slowly among people who appear to post
things judiciously (and might even comment about it in ways that add content)
vs various types of bullshit or low-quality content. Again, paranoia suggests
that weeding out reflexively transmitted garbage and 'fake news' (for whatever
value of 'fake' you're holding today) cuts a bit too close to the business
model...

~~~
allenz
> how hard can it be to spot these kind of non-organic actors in the social
> graph?

Very hard. Graph theory contains some of the hardest problems in computer
science. For example, maybe you want to find the largest group of nodes that
are all connected to each other. We don't know how to do this. If the largest
clique has n nodes, our best approximation methods can find log(n) of them,
which is pretty useless.[1]

Spam detection at FB scale is difficult because with so many users many actual
accounts will appear unusual in some way, and of course all data can be faked.
Google and Yahoo have worked on this for years, yet spammers can still evade
their systems: [2]

> there's probably little distinction between FB's valued corporate customers
> and advertisers and these 'information operations'

The distinction is pretty clear. FB knows exactly who its advertisers are
since they pay FB money to promote their posts. It's true that fake news
increases engagement, but FB is tackling an easier problem--identifying active
operations making millions of fake accounts.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique_problem)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13802227](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13802227)

~~~
fmap
I agree with you in principle, but I think the problem is more one of scale
than of complexity theory.

Sure the clique problem is hard to approximate in arbitrary graphs, but the
graphs that appear in social networks are far from arbitrary. And indeed, in
such scale free networks the clique problem becomes quasi polynomial or
polynomial
([http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-35261-4_6...](http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-35261-4_68)).
Approximate solutions are also much easier to find.

On the other hand, the sheer size of Facebook's social graph means that
anything other than streaming algorithms or local search is pretty much
intractable. That makes solving these kinds of problems into interesting
engineering challenges.

~~~
allenz
Good points. Pedantic aside: scale-free is a dangerous assumption for two
reasons. First, there may be fairly large deviations from power law in real
data, and any such deviation renders the problem intractable. Second, botnets
can modify local and possibly global properties in adversarial ways, so as to
hide in or make large areas that are not scale-free.

------
funtober
Some scammers on Facebook have seized on to my aunt's name and image as the
front for their operations. As family, they friend us from fake accounts on at
least a weekly basis. Despite reporting these fake accounts more than 100
times, I got a new one today. They ask me for feedback every time I report an
account. They are not getting positive reviews. Based on this experience, I'm
not optimistic in their abilities.

~~~
sandworm101
I've got a similar problem with my own face. Scammers take public information
from bar associations (I'm a lawyer) and build fake profiles using photos from
firm websites. As I don't have any facebook account myself, finding and
reporting these is a real difficulty. Most large law firms have someone
dedicated to protecting the firm's name on social media but small firms just
don't have the time.

FYI, don't believe anything said by a "lawyer" on facebook. We don't ever
start communications that way. Visit the local bar association's website and
check the lawyer's real contact info before saying anything.

~~~
mirimir
It sounds like they're using your name, not just your face. Or are they just
creating plausible fake lawyers? And what's the game? I can imagine that
they're soliciting "customers", who they'll go on to dupe and rip off.

I do like your profile, by the way. It sounds like the lawyer-expert dynamic
to me.

~~~
sandworm101
They send threatening messages to people that include links and data from
firm/bar websites to make it seem as if it comes from a real lawyer. In
extreme cases they setup entirely fake websites with data harvested from legit
law firms.

No lawyer will send a threat via facebook. And no lawyer will ever demand a
payment via bitcoin or gift cards.

~~~
mirimir
I am still too naive :(

So they scam people into "settling" fake litigation. Over Facebook. And many
people, who of course don't have much of a clue, fall for it. Amazing. But
some of them, frightened and angry, contact your firm.

In some other world, where GnuPG had become widely used, legal communications
would be signed, and people could just check signatures. That wouldn't help
for fake websites, however.

------
zitterbewegung
It seems like more and more the threat of fake news is being treated as
security theater. The solutions that google and Facebook are setting up don't
seem like they would be effective in the real world. Instead they are
justifying more control over their social ecosystems.

~~~
leot
Counter-proposal?

~~~
mercer
If it is 'security theater', or alternatively just a tempest in a teacup,
doing nothing would be a perfectly fine alternative, at least for the time
being.

------
mirimir
> Though the goals may often be to promote one cause or candidate or to
> denigrate another, another objective appears to be sowing distrust and
> confusion in general, the authors wrote.

> In some cases, they said, the same fake accounts engaged with both sides of
> an issue "with the apparent intent of increasing tensions between
> supporters."

Where I come from, we call that trolling :) Sounds just like Usenet.

~~~
the_cat_kittles
also a tried and true method of political fuckery, used lately to depressing
perfection. trolling is not without its consequences.

~~~
mirimir
True that. I see it as the endgame of Eternal September.

------
jmnicolas
> "Facebook Inc acknowledged on Thursday that it has become a battleground for
> governments seeking to manipulate public opinion in other countries"

Why should we take them seriously since they don't acknowledge the fact that
the biggest manipulator of social media is the US government itself.

------
Mao_Zedang
Here comes the most over used method in the playbook 'selective enforcement'

Even google is falling in line,
[https://streamable.com/uq0d6](https://streamable.com/uq0d6)

Troubling times.

~~~
nebabyte
> "We're not arguing for censorship, we're just arguing for - take it off the
> page"

I actually facepalmed at this.

These people _know_ that impression drives reality. They're basically saying
"so hey, we found this great slippery slope that looks like a lot of fun!"
What the hell?

The grail for algorithms should be to HELP display/persist the disproof of
misinformation, objectively and efficiently. Not just to HIDE it and hope it
goes away!

~~~
cat199
> The grail for algorithms should be to HELP display/persist the disproof of
> misinformation, objectively and efficiently. Not just to HIDE it and hope it
> goes away!

Or like, give people control over their own data..

I have ~/.procmailrc - where is my ~/.facebookrc :b

------
SN76477
I believe that this takes us to a dark place. I fear that social currency is
going to be the end of humanity. The price of verifying that every member is
an actual human comes as a great cost to society. Social media should be fun
and goofy, but if this continues, it is going to double as a passport soon (it
almost already does)

Then you will be no one if you do not have a Facebook account.

------
Alex3917
The actual Facebook white paper was submitted a few hours ago:

[https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-security/making-
face...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-security/making-facebook-
safe-and-secure-for-authentic-communication/10154362152760766/)

~~~
notyourwork
This is probably a better link:
[https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/facebook-
an...](https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/facebook-and-
information-operations-v1.pdf)

~~~
bigbugbag
thanks, this is actually a link that I can use as all facebook IP and domains
are blocked.

------
mschuster91
The core problem is that many political activists, from both the left and
right wing, need "fake accounts" because Facebook is quite ban-happy and we
don't want to risk our personal accounts being banned for political speech.

Given that Facebook now is more or less neccessary to stay in contact with
friends and family, it should be regulated like a public communications
utility - which means that banning people from communicating with friends and
family must not happen, unless that is abused for spamming. Your DSL or phone
provider is not allowed to cut your service for anything than abuse, too - so
why should Facebook (and also, Twitter and Snapchat!) be excepted?!

~~~
gdulli
Did you read the article? It's not about banning fake accounts. It's about
information operations. The government wouldn't let Russia use our phone lines
to spread a disinformation campaign.

~~~
whatupmd
s/would/should/g

s/phone/communication/g

------
braderhart
Half of the ones that I report which are obviously fake, are allowed to stay
up. Pretty sure Facebook employees have a working agreement with certain scam
operations.

~~~
bpodgursky
I don't think there's any need for conspiracy theories. The human cost and PR
impact of closing an incorrectly fake account are massive compared to the cost
of closing one spammer.

Facebook is right to be incredibly cautious. Imagine getting your gmail or
Facebook account shut down because of suspected fraud, and what a huge
personal impact that would have on you. Facebook realizes this, and also
realizes it is a PR nightmare every time one of those stories makes it onto HN
/ reddit.

~~~
rojobuffalo
Would it really be a "huge" impact if you were locked out of your account for
a bit? They could have an appeals process. What negative things could actually
occur in your life if you were denied access to Facebook for a week while they
reviewed your appeal?

~~~
bigbugbag
Have you considered that means you would be denied login on all the websites
you used facebook login to register ?

~~~
nebabyte
Man, that just makes my average-to-good decision to not use that out-of-my-
control login route brilliant!

100% for it, I'm always happy to see people freely sacrificing their control
in the name of 'convenience' get fucked by that decision :)

The only way for them to integrate with a better society is to learn, really.

------
staunch
What if all comments had information about the poster's IP address. Maybe a
unique hash based on IP, country of origin, registered organization?

Maybe that way people could at least identify suspicious patterns themselves.

But even without any new data, a third-party could identify troll rings on
reddit, youtube, and twitter by scraping the data.

Some pro-democracy group should probably be funding this kind of technical
approach. It's likely to be a lot more effective than waiting for all these
companies to do it themselves.

~~~
bigbugbag
IP is not personally identifiable data, there's a European ruling on this.
Then there's a trove of techniques to mask IPs that bad guys know and regular
people don't, so this would negatively affect regular persons and have no
effect on the targets.

------
whatupmd
FB, Twitter and other social sites are under market pressures to
maintain/increase user base. At the same time they must justify to skeptical
customers/investors that the numbers they publish are legitimate somehow. So,
they must adopt a token effort to to combat this, but really it is in their
best interest to allow masquerading so long as it is sophisticated enough to
not be to obvious.

------
slim
It seems "Information Operation" has an official page on facebook. Just ban
them. Easy fight.
[https://m.facebook.com/USAIOP](https://m.facebook.com/USAIOP)

------
intended
How?

------
known
FB cannot insulate itself from Constitutional rights of Users

~~~
ubernostrum
Which constitutional rights would Facebook be violating if it decided to shut
down your account?

(hint: the US Constitution does not guarantee you a right to use Facebook, or
any other private-sector service)

~~~
mschuster91
> (hint: the US Constitution does not guarantee you a right to use Facebook,
> or any other private-sector service)

Oh yes, it does - your phone/DSL provider, for example, is not allowed to
terminate your service for anything but missed payments and abuse
(spamming/hacking). Facebook and other social networks must not be excepted
from this!

~~~
gdulli
But you know there are also laws against fraud, right?

