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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

#111

Post by nnfy »

skinnymuch wrote: post #99
nnfy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was one of the final straws for me. I don't think anyone should trust Facebook with enough information to completely take over someone's real life identity. FB feels authoritarian in a very Orwellian way, and it is even scarier that, much like Orwell wrote, nobody seems to care. We might not be burning books a la Bradbury, but we seem to be burning away our rights to privacy as a complicit society.

Do you feel the same way about other major institutions like Google and Amazon (they're still getting there)?

Of course. This kind of power is so easy to abuse.

Unfortunately, google and amazon are a little harder to abandon than fb because of their utility...

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

#112

Post by PeterisP »

rosser wrote: post #30
Stranger43 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except of cause that's also how very real grassroot movement's look especially those not made up of American college students, i.e. you have a fairly high chance of chance of you accidentally targeting a few thousand genuine users. Remembering that almost all of facebooks growth potential is outside of the US. Facebook really cannot afford to just kick off people based on not being us college students. The problem is…

> ...you have a fairly high chance of chance of you accidentally targeting a few thousand genuine users. Which is why I said "further scrutiny", and not robo-ban. The tone of these posts is very much, and very consistently the whole "sow dissension" and "poke at wedge issues" shtick that is demonstrably part of how the Russians have been meddling in our shit — and which Facebook, perhaps knowingly, profited from. (Un…

Well, if you can't robo-ban then that's kind of the problem. As you say, identifying likely bad accounts isn't a problem, and they definitely can do that. But what do you do next?

Let's suppose that you identify just (on FB scale) 10 million likely fake accounts. There are only three options - apply further scrutiny, which would take hundreds of workers and cost lots of money, which isn't worth the (minimal) benefit to FB; robo-ban them which inevitably means false positives and would mean lots and lots of people contesting the ban, and real bot accounts are just as likely to contest than normal users, costing time in manual review; or do nothing unless the account is reported for something horrible, which seems to be the only cost-effective option.

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

#113

Post by ksk »

sanderjd wrote: post #88
ksk wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But you haven't attempted to refute the well-described basis of that problem statement. Which parts do you think are wrong?

I personally don't find it well described, or useful. I chose to engage the commentator in a way that brought us both to a common ground position.

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

#114

Post by Chaebixi »

stingraycharles wrote: post #11
menacingly wrote: post #5

I 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…

I agree with this sentiment. While you want to develop a scalable filter that is able to police these kind of things, the flip side may be even worse — discrimination, racism, etc. Just look at the backlash that YouTube is getting for their recent changes in their algorithm, if Facebook gets even slightly too many false negatives the backlash is likely to be a lot worse. I would hate to stand in Zuckerberg’s shoes he…

> I would hate to stand in Zuckerberg’s shoes here. It seems like they will lose this fight, no matter what. The solution might be more political than technical; that is, to teach people to be skeptical and use proper judgement when reading news articles.

He could just hire more and better people to do the moderation (or handle appeals). I kinda feel companies like Facebook take the attitude that things aren't worth doing unless they can be automated by an algorithm.

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

#115

Post by nerfhammer »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #107
skinnymuch wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they did. So what do you find wrong with their first point or any others? And that might make your suggestion better?

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, const…

If you constrain the issue to just fake accounts that's quite a bit easier, everyone agrees about the difference between a bot and a person at least in principle. Versus all forms of possible content moderation, e.g. should youtube ban Alex Jones.

And I'm not sure that the total outrage level will ever decrease the more responsibility for moderation they are seen as having.

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

#116

Post by wpietri »

skinnymuch wrote: post #97
specialist wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 F…

But sometimes people create a second account or an account for some odd reason that isn't directly obviously them. But they'll properly use those accounts. Do you just ban these accounts too? Accounts not doing any harm and potentially being beneficial to certain things like FB group participation or posts. Finally, if they act like real users since they are, it helps Facebook's bottom line. Booting them would hurt F…

They could handle that use in a few ways. The easiest would be to tie the second account back to the first, so that FB knows but nobody else does. But presumably people are doing that for a reason, and the real solution is to create a feature for one's main account that accommodates that reason. And banning is not an unreasonable solution. Facebook is demonstrably ok with losing small amounts of marginal traffic, especially if that helps limit abuse. Their number one asset is trust, and anything that chips away at that trust is extremely dangerous for them.

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

#117

Post by wpietri »

white-flame wrote: post #94
wpietri wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a very thoughtful response. If Facebook and Twitter were no more useful or trustworthy than 4chan, then they wouldn't exist. It's like saying, "I can't believe people are trusting encyclopedias and cookbooks. There's no reason that readers should consider them any different than stuff written on a bathroom wall." The problem is the gap between what they sell themselves as and what the actual user experien…

You can generally trust your connections to your acquaintances, and companies/personas you know from elsewhere. It's all the external feeds wanting your attention & commenters throwing in their 2 bits that are the random noise. This is the domain where the propagandists are working, and where there is no and should be no trust. There's no difference between some nobody posting from their personal account, and some no…

Note that you've gone from the dramatic "it all should be held at arm's length" to the somewhat less dramatic "some of it is ok to trust, but this other stuff isn't". That's precisely what I meant when I said your first comment wasn't well thought out.

Your new position is still too extreme; human trust is not binary. We could go another round where I point out exceptions and you come up with another model that is still too simple. And again, and again. Eventually, we might even get to a point where a useful discussion could be had. But it's not my job to force you to think past your taste for dramatic statements. It's yours.

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

#118

Post by sanderjd »

ksk wrote: post #113
sanderjd wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you haven't attempted to refute the well-described basis of that problem statement. Which parts do you think are wrong?

I personally don't find it well described, or useful. I chose to engage the commentator in a way that brought us both to a common ground position.

> I chose to engage the commentator in a way that brought us both to a common ground position.

Where? I don't see any more comments from you in this thread...

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

#119

Post by wpietri »

abakker wrote: post #81
philipwhiuk wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I've always found the 'YouTube gets too much video to moderate it' a particularly shit argument. Maybe they not be allowed to have as much content then.

That doesn’t seem to be a useful solution, either. I mean, eat tool would you use to manage that? Limit total videos per website? How do you determine who gets to stay? Money? Clicks? Moderating all the videos is hard, but if the videos go to a different platform, they still need that same moderation, right?

There are plenty of ways you could do that. Off the top of my head: Every video-posting account must be validated with, e.g., a credit card. New accounts have clear posting limits. Accounts behaving badly get charged for cleanup. If you want to get paid by YouTube you have to go through an extensive validation process, including background check. If you are found to be abusing the platform, money will be clawed back, and if you can't prove sufficient resources to handle a clawback, you instead have to post a bond or find an insurer who will guarantee you.

Sure, some videos may go to another platform. And for most things, that'd be fine. A lot of videos people post on YouTube are just accidentally hosted there, and would be just as good posted on, e.g., Facebook, Twitter, or another personal account provider. But there's a whole class of garbage that YouTube has because one way or another it allows people to get paid. That garbage is a negative externality on the rest of us, and there's no particular reason for us to allow YouTube to profit from it.

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

#120

Post by skinnymuch »

nnfy wrote: post #111
skinnymuch wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you feel the same way about other major institutions like Google and Amazon (they're still getting there)?

Of course. This kind of power is so easy to abuse. Unfortunately, google and amazon are a little harder to abandon than fb because of their utility...

Just wondering. You say "of course", but the amount of negativity relating to what we are talking about that Facebook gets compared to other giants like Google or Amazon is incredibly slanted. Mainly in tech or geek centric sites like this or many reddit subreddits. So it's not always an obvious thing for me if someone is cool enough with Google but not Facebook.

I successfully use Bing for 95-99% of my search engine searches. I haven't made the time to get off Gmail. It'll take a while. I don't believe getting off Google is any harder than getting off Facebook for many people. Because if you're not using Google search or Android with Google apps, Google's utility isn't that high for you. Gmail also isn't miles ahead anymore.

Unfortunately I'm so into the Alexa ecosystem I'm nowhere near away from Amazon.

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