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Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot

#71

Post by tzakrajs »

rosser wrote: post #42
Stranger43 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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 sociocultur…

Facebook truly needs an independent group to audit their site and give them a grade. Anyone interested in doing this with me?

Re: Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot

#72

Post by white-flame »

wpietri wrote: post #35
jmcqk6 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 chine…

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…

I find it ridiculous that text on random social media accounts is being associated with "safety".

If anything, it's the user's own misuse and mishandling of their own information, and their lack of understanding that anybody can publish anything, that makes their specific use of social media "unsafe". The trust and total integration of Facebook into people's lives is the actual unsafe component, which Facebook themselves actively promote; it all should be held at arm's length.

There is no reason that users should consider random words on random Facebook accounts any differently than words posted on 4chan.

Re: Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot

#73

Post by spaceseaman »

white-flame wrote: post #72
wpietri wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I find it ridiculous that text on random social media accounts is being associated with "safety". If anything, it's the user's own misuse and mishandling of their own information, and their lack of understanding that anybody can publish anything, that makes their specific use of social media "unsafe". The trust and total integration of Facebook into people's lives is the actual unsafe component, which Facebook themse…

> There is no reason that users should consider random words on random Facebook accounts any differently than words posted on 4chan.

You're right! They're both dangerous. If I posted your public address on both of those websites, how you would you feel about your own safety? Not your Facebook account mind you - just somewhere on Facebook.

That's unsafe speech. Other examples of text where being associated with safety makes sense:

1.) "Hey everybody! Let's kill all type of people who like X tomorrow. Like and share to get the word out!"

2.) "Hey here's the address and personal info of someone I disagree with politically. Let's organize an effort to camp outside their house with guns to scare them. Or lets "SWAT" them.

I am not misusing my information in either of these cases. Instead my information is being misused by others who use the space as an organizing ground. When people ask for Facebook to be regulated, they want hate speech like the above to be removed. People make the argument that this is a slippery slope, but that's a fallacy for a reason. It's trivial to regulate speech of this form on their platforms if they were willing to pay for it, but they aren't. Thus we must force them to regulate this.

You're conflating a regulation of speech one disagrees with, with hate speech. Hate speech is not simply speech I disagree with. It can be clearly defined in many cases (like above), and in the cases where it can't one can simply err towards allowing it.

Re: Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot

#75

Post by ksk »

dymk wrote: post #62
ksk wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think its worth trying out something even if the result is less than perfect.

So you're falling into (3) and ignoring how important (1) is

Um, the person simply defined a problem into existence. There is no agreed upon basis of thinking like this.

Re: Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot

#76

Post by aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA »

devonkim wrote: post #49

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…

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.

Re: Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot

#77

Post by specialist »

wpietri wrote: post #35
jmcqk6 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 chine…

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…

I don't buy it.

Facebook knows with absolute certainty if an account is legit or not.

Cambridge Analytics, Lexis/Nexus (nee Seisent), ChoicePoint (oops, bought by Lexis/Nexus), Palantir, NSA, and others have all uniquely identitied every person, living or dead.

Facebook has even more data. Facebook even has phantom profiles for people without accounts. Of course they know who's legit. They can't not know.

Just like Facebook juices their ad numbers, they're lying here too.

Frankly, I'm shocked, shocked that Facebook would lie about their culpability here.

--

Twitter might plausibly not know. So they can contract with any of the dozen of 3rd parties that provide demographic databases as a service.

Re: Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot

#78

Post by aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA »

erjjones wrote: post #69

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.

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.

Re: Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot

#79

Post by panic »

nerfhammer wrote: post #41
jmcqk6 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 chine…

1) ANY single prominent example of a false positive or false negative will enrage some community. People's brains can only think of examples, not rates. 2) With billions of accounts zero examples of error is an absurdity. 3) different communities drastically disagree on which things false positives and false negatives should be defined as. 4) More perceived effort to work on (1) increases the outrage, i.e. the percei…

These are all great arguments for why Facebook's current model can never be a good way to run a social network. We need tools for people to build their own networks and make their own decisions, not a centralized network where all the decisions for the entire world are made by a small team in California.

Re: Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot

#80

Post by white-flame »

spaceseaman wrote: post #73
white-flame wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it ridiculous that text on random social media accounts is being associated with "safety". If anything, it's the user's own misuse and mishandling of their own information, and their lack of understanding that anybody can publish anything, that makes their specific use of social media "unsafe". The trust and total integration of Facebook into people's lives is the actual unsafe component, which Facebook themse…

> There is no reason that users should consider random words on random Facebook accounts any differently than words posted on 4chan. You're right! They're both dangerous. If I posted your public address on both of those websites, how you would you feel about your own safety? Not your Facebook account mind you - just somewhere on Facebook. That's unsafe speech. Other examples of text where being associated with safety…

> You're conflating a regulation of speech one disagrees with, with hate speech.

I'm not calling for regulation, nor labeling anything "hate speech" (ergo not conflating the two, either), so I have no idea where this particular statement of yours is coming from.

What I'm saying is that trusting sites where anybody can post anything is the core danger of the situations instigating this specific mess, and that trust is the fault of the reader, and of Facebook falsely positioning itself as a trustworthy information source.

This situation isn't about "hate speech", incitements to violence, or any other already-illegal acts. To quote, it discusses the "far larger problem, in which the platforms are gamed for profit or political influence." At its core is the observation that people let Facebook content influence their finances and politics; the demonstrable dump of people's unthinking, reactionary blurted opinions, and their personal or incentivized proselytizing/propagandist/marketing skews. These are the random words of random accounts, all unworthy of blind trust.

Facebook wants to discriminate "trustworthy" from "untrustworthy" somehow, and to do so algorithmically. To be very specific, what's at stake here is Facebook's desire to have a particular PR posture as "the" place to be online, for their own gains. There's no actual direct safety issue involved here driving these automated "trustworthiness" speech classifications. It is both unnecessary for the site to function socially, and ultimately unworkable as an implementation from its very concept.

What is necessary for a properly functioning mashup of the world's unfettered speech in one place, is more distrust by the users of what's posted, as there's no reason to trust it in the first place. Again, from a content perspective it's no different from 4chan.

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