Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot
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Re: Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot
#2A 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.
Re: Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot
#3Facebook'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...
Re: Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot
#4A 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.
Re: Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot
#5I 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.
Re: Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot
#6A 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 existen…
Could that be a sign that current AI is not as intellgient as tech blogs suggest?
Re: Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot
#7A 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 existen…
it seems like an existential risk to them
Maybe the problem is that they don't think this is true. How will it put them out of business? Lawsuits? Government forcing them to pull the plug? People not using the platform because fake stuff is there? I'm not convinced that the end result of any one of these paths will be strong enough to wreck their businesses.
Re: Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot
#8A 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 existen…
Could that be a sign that current AI is not as intellgient as tech blogs suggest?
And that AI is a bubble within a bubble?
Re: Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot
#9Facebook'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...
That depends - Does Hollywood count as 'eastern european gangsters'?
They are probably responsible for every bit as much phony account influence peddling as anyone else..
Re: Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot
#10Facebook'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...
Do they know for sure who is sitting at the computer?