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The fake Facebook profile industry

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Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#11

Post by Harvey-Specter »

irishbro wrote: post #8

The 2010 documentary catfish, and subsequent mtv series, offers an interesting look behind the curtain at the type of people who create fake facebook profiles. It covers a wide variety of reasons for creating them spanning from people who suffer from low self-esteem and confidence issues to not being able to reveal that they are homo-sexual out of fear of their friends and family finding out, just out of pure malice…

> in one case creating a fake account story to get the show to pay for flights so they could finally meet face to face.

That's brilliant. I couldn't find anything about this episode on google, but I'm interested to know how the hosts reacted to that.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#12

Post by fiatpandas »

This... was an unreadable experience. Gratuitous animations, football field sized paragraph widths, proportional/fluid CSS sizing (thought maximizing my browser on a 1080p screen would allow me to see more), bite sized paragraphs interspersed with information-thin graphic inserts, full width graphics that have a larger height than your browser viewport, text swooshing down the screen while you're scrolling because the above graphic is dynamically resizing.

I appreciate the desire to experiment with the medium, but it just does a disservice to the content.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#13

Post by gjem97 »

gumby wrote: post #6

Ugh, there is no way to just read the text, you have to scroll from short paragraph to short paragraph, like a fancy tweet storm. Do they even want people to read that thing?

Can someone with a longer attention span than me provide a summary? I didn't get far enough to glean what the "scam" is.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#14

Post by hackerguy99 »

dannyw wrote: post #3

I find it unbelievable that Facebook doesn't have the fake profile situation under control. Facebook builds an incredibly detailed social graph of every user (and non-user) with a big trail of activity, on and off Facebook. Surely there are signs; surely there are common characteristics, and if this journalist can write such a detailed exposé with only public data, Facebook can do much better.

1. The cost of false positives is too high. 2. There is no incentive (yet) to not count fake accounts in "3 billion people use Facebook!". That's coming though, when ad prices fall.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#15

Post by djsumdog »

fiatpandas wrote: post #12

This... was an unreadable experience. Gratuitous animations, football field sized paragraph widths, proportional/fluid CSS sizing (thought maximizing my browser on a 1080p screen would allow me to see more), bite sized paragraphs interspersed with information-thin graphic inserts, full width graphics that have a larger height than your browser viewport, text swooshing down the screen while you're scrolling because th…

I agree. It was pretty annoying. So are the new top/bottom footers on Medium. I sometimes open up the inspector and delete those two divs just to read the page, but most of the time I don't bother, give up on the article, and just close the tab.

Content should just be content. You shouldn't need Javascript to simply view a page. Even if this was all just CSS tricks, it's still pretty annoying. I mean it's a neat idea. Scrolling animation can be kinda neat if done right, but this totally wasn't. It takes away from the content, which is pretty interesting.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#16

Post by monk_e_boy »

djsumdog wrote: post #15
fiatpandas wrote: post #12

This... was an unreadable experience. Gratuitous animations, football field sized paragraph widths, proportional/fluid CSS sizing (thought maximizing my browser on a 1080p screen would allow me to see more), bite sized paragraphs interspersed with information-thin graphic inserts, full width graphics that have a larger height than your browser viewport, text swooshing down the screen while you're scrolling because th…

I agree. It was pretty annoying. So are the new top/bottom footers on Medium. I sometimes open up the inspector and delete those two divs just to read the page, but most of the time I don't bother, give up on the article, and just close the tab. Content should just be content. You shouldn't need Javascript to simply view a page. Even if this was all just CSS tricks, it's still pretty annoying. I mean it's a neat idea…

> I sometimes open up the inspector and delete those two divs just to read the page

It's crazy how often I need to do this as well. I remember back in the old days hitting esc would stop all the animations on a page, now you need to inspect + delete those elements.

There needs to be some crowd sourced way of doing this, so if you delete an element and I visit the site, the element is gone.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#17

Post by djsumdog »

dannyw wrote: post #3

I find it unbelievable that Facebook doesn't have the fake profile situation under control. Facebook builds an incredibly detailed social graph of every user (and non-user) with a big trail of activity, on and off Facebook. Surely there are signs; surely there are common characteristics, and if this journalist can write such a detailed exposé with only public data, Facebook can do much better.

To have this many accounts, they might have a series of scripts and potentially farm out captcha. I find it interesting the article mentions one of them messing up and switching to a fake account in a post. That would suggest some of this is done manually, which would be bizarre.

I'm sure Facebook creates filters that helps delete some, but remember it's a constant war between spam script writers and platforms. They're constantly finding ways to get around each other.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#18

Post by irishbro »

Harvey-Specter wrote: post #11
irishbro wrote: post #8

The 2010 documentary catfish, and subsequent mtv series, offers an interesting look behind the curtain at the type of people who create fake facebook profiles. It covers a wide variety of reasons for creating them spanning from people who suffer from low self-esteem and confidence issues to not being able to reveal that they are homo-sexual out of fear of their friends and family finding out, just out of pure malice…

> in one case creating a fake account story to get the show to pay for flights so they could finally meet face to face. That's brilliant. I couldn't find anything about this episode on google, but I'm interested to know how the hosts reacted to that.

It is season 4 episode 18. Here is a summary of the episode http://www.mtv.com/news/2244348/catfish-fake-victim/

I can't remember the exact reactions but Machine Gun Kelly was a guest host and was not happy about it. I imagine the producers where pretty happy that they got something exciting happening.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#19

Post by djsumdog »

gjem97 wrote: post #13
gumby wrote: post #6

Ugh, there is no way to just read the text, you have to scroll from short paragraph to short paragraph, like a fancy tweet storm. Do they even want people to read that thing?

Can someone with a longer attention span than me provide a summary? I didn't get far enough to glean what the "scam" is.

I kept skimming to the bottom, but unless I missed something, they never actually catch these people and report them to the police do they? Like it looks like they determine two of their real names and then .. nothing?

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#20

Post by mseo »

djsumdog wrote: post #15
fiatpandas wrote: post #12

This... was an unreadable experience. Gratuitous animations, football field sized paragraph widths, proportional/fluid CSS sizing (thought maximizing my browser on a 1080p screen would allow me to see more), bite sized paragraphs interspersed with information-thin graphic inserts, full width graphics that have a larger height than your browser viewport, text swooshing down the screen while you're scrolling because th…

I agree. It was pretty annoying. So are the new top/bottom footers on Medium. I sometimes open up the inspector and delete those two divs just to read the page, but most of the time I don't bother, give up on the article, and just close the tab. Content should just be content. You shouldn't need Javascript to simply view a page. Even if this was all just CSS tricks, it's still pretty annoying. I mean it's a neat idea…

I really like outline.com (they also have a chrome extension), which shows a stripped down version of the article. It works pretty reliable with medium and most other common sources.

Just have a look at https://outline.com/vznfxw

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