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

>, but I don't know that "easy to spot" is a good yardstick.

Anecdotal, but my dog has had a Facebook account for a decade now. He makes appropriate comments and likes too. His profile picture and stats are accurate. Given that FB can detect faces and assign names to them, I assume they know this account is bullshit. There's got to be some aspects of avoidance of their part. Growth is more important than making sure accounts are real, unless people report it.

I think they simply don't have an elegant, technical solution for what amounts to old fashioned "policing" or "investigative" work that they simply refuse to or don't want to do because it probably isn't a priority (until it is).

The solution seams akin to the neighbor stealing cable.

Send someone out to go look.

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

Not that person, but I objected to:

0 -- The outrage caused by misidentified profiles is larger than the outrage or societal damage caused by the existence of fake profiles.

...which was an unstated assumption underpinning why that entire argument would be an objection to implementing account review, and in my estimation is incredibly incorrect. They're being forced into Senate hearings over the false profiles, constantly being harassed by merchants about possible ad fraud over them, and are losing the trust of their communities. By contrast, the storm in a teacup over a few misidentifications is nothing to Facebook. (There's numerous other unstated, highly subjective assumptions as well.)

I also object to:

1 -- This is true, but irrelevant. Facebook cares about the rates of outrage in communities, not the mere existence. Ironically, this person seems to have fallen into the trap they called out, by thinking Facebook cared about instances of outrage (as the poster would). They also care about the relative outrage -- how mad are people compared to another option we can try. This point very poorly frames the problem as being about trying to stop any outrage instead of trying to minimize outrage.

4 -- This is community specific and untrue of the bulk of people. Decreasing error increases the vitriol involved, but it seems to come from a decreasing number of people as the outrage evaporates in the face of better error rates. So I think they're outright wrong here: it's like water cooling as it evaporates. The water is going away, even though it's cooler in the area.

5 -- This one becomes irrelevant (and/or wrong) if you correct the mistakes in 1 and 4.

Overall, this argument is --

a) irrelevant because even if it was correct, it wouldn't matter as it fails to contextualize its point by comparing levels of outrage between sources

b) wrong internally, in that it's largely irrelevant to the problem at hand or just outright wrong.

Since you can't live in a parallel universe where you have a Facebook account you can't possibly know if you're missing out or not.

You also negligent to understand that the world isn't static - communication channels move to different platforms. When I was young "texting" took place through AOL's servers. Imagine if a business said "well the web wasn't around when we started so a website must be useless to us."

I've reconnected with childhood friends who have long moved away on Facebook, so have a couple other people I know. That's invaluable.

Without a Facebook you miss out on the one-off things you may say to a group but probably won't call everyone in your address book plus that guy you met at that conference last week, and your old college buddy you haven't seen in 10 years. Most of the time they aren't "important," but they can be, such as "My company is looking to hire for ${position}, is anyone interested?"

Facebook also facilitates getting to know new people so much easier. It's very "low friction" to add someone you "know of but don't know" on Facebook. That can lead to new friendships. Sure, it's not the only way to make friends, that doesn't discount it.