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The fake Facebook profile industry

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Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#121

Post by whathaschanged »

dopamean wrote: post #87
code_duck wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The climate of judging people for private sexual morality is slowly changing in the United States… Same with marijuana smoking. In the 90s, affairs or past pot smoking were considered a big deal. Since then, we have elected Obama and Trump, who would not have passed moral snuff in the 80s.

I know plenty of people who despite really, really disliking Donald Trump were very put off by the public discussion of the "pee tape" stuff. They called it kink shaming and said that on its own it shouldn't matter if that is the kind of stuff the President is into. I tend to agree and I think a lot of other sensible people do too.

All the people I know called it what it actually is, projection by angry liberals who cannot fathom somebody winning the presidency with thoughts different than their own, so they need to fabricate outlandish claims.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#122

Post by trevman »

djsumdog wrote: post #29

I think the saddest part of this is that they prey on people. Many of the peeps here on HN can look at a profile and say "spam," so it's hard to imagine the people who can't. The 1% return from SPAM that click on those links, or put in their credit card details. There was a ReplyAll podcast episode where one of the reporters actually tracks down a shop in India; even goes there and talks to people who've worked at a…

Intervention did a fantastic episode on "Greg," a man who had a large cash windfall that managed to squander it all on internet scams. You'll probably cry; I know I did.

http://intervention-directory.com/2011/12/episode-105-greg/

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#123

Post by Mz »

dswalter wrote: post #61
davchana wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know the ids of those two divs, you could easily make a javascript bookmarklet to delete those two divs at click of a button. Or I will be happy to do that for you just for fun :)

Please call it "Large, a screen-friendly view for Medium".

Or: Larj. ;-)

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#124

Post by adam12 »

abtom wrote: post #57
throwawayfish wrote: post #32

Using a throwaway account to keep things private Last year I was "sex-torted" on Facebook but not by a ring of French criminals. Instead, it was by someone I had chatted with on the internet years ago (while we were both still teenagers) She had recently gotten divorced and contacted me after many years away. We spoke about intimate things (I never shared intimate images, though she did) and were getting closer and c…

This is something that could have happened to anyone. Not just because of misplaced trust in an online partner but because it's easy to create fake screenshots of conversations using Photoshop or simply Inspect Element. I'm interested in how you mitigated the damage once the post was published. A good strategy might have been to simply discredit it as being fake/photoshopped along with a small tutorial showing how ea…

> A good strategy might have been to simply discredit it as being fake/photoshopped along with a small tutorial showing how easy it is to create (most aren't tech savvy enough to understand this already).

He might have done that. I know if this happened to me and I denied it, I'd still be scarred for life.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#125

Post by MarkPNeyer »

All of the problems with fake profiles are fixable if we just use the social graph. It drives me nuts that this a problem. I have a solution, which i'll share here. I'm sharing it because i hope SOMEONE can build this or share it with someone at a high level at FB or twitter.

I have a mortgage in silicon valley and a young child, so i'm not in a position to take the time and risk to do this. But i really desperately want to see it in the world.

All we have to do is use the social graph to verify each other, and follow 'verified' edges to determine trust in a third party. People can just tell fb or twitter 'yes i know this account', and that's all we really need.

If I can't follow any 'yes i know this person edges' to a remote account, don't let me interact with that account. Shadowban them. It's THAT simple. This technique stops bots and it stops trolling by fake remote accounts.

If someone claims "i know all these fake accounts", then we ban that person, for creating all the fake accounts. Fake accounts are easily identified after the fact; when no real person pays any price, they'll keep getting created.

Yes it has the downside of temporarily slowing adoption. That's the main reason imagine twitter and FB haven't done this. They think us being harassed is less important than onboarding new people.

https://s3.neyer.me/respect-matrix-slides.pdf

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#126

Post by emodendroket »

tajen wrote: post #106
throwawayfish wrote: post #32

Using a throwaway account to keep things private Last year I was "sex-torted" on Facebook but not by a ring of French criminals. Instead, it was by someone I had chatted with on the internet years ago (while we were both still teenagers) She had recently gotten divorced and contacted me after many years away. We spoke about intimate things (I never shared intimate images, though she did) and were getting closer and c…

Hi. Apart from deeply empathizing with you, I have to say there are millions of men who suffer similar problems because there’s extremely little empathy for them. Ex: PyCon, James Damore and GitHub. If you want people to develop empathy for men (which are often at the bottom of the priority list, below women and dogs), MRM movements need more highly competent people and money. Check out what the CAFE organization doe…

Seems like James Damore has almost nothing to do with this scenario, not least because in his case he voluntarily shared his manifesto publicly.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#127

Post by mkoryak »

Lately I have been getting contacted by random 'women' on gtalk who 'just want to be friends'. I usually just block them but last week I decided to play along.

Long story short: they wanted me to cam with them and to see my picture. I sent them a link to non-existent page on my domain and logged their IP. I confronted them with their IP and the fact that they were in Nigeria and not south Carolina. The account was immediately deleted.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#128

Post by JetSpiegel »

taurath wrote: post #119
pohl wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they scuttle their own engagement metrics by pruning out highly-engaged segments of the social network, though?

Because as it becomes more fake they lose their reason to have users in the first place. Ads are the product, metrics are the data that leads to the product, and users are the raw material. If they lose the raw material the product loses value.

> https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/FB/chart

The data disagrees with your analysis.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#129

Post by rconti »

mullen wrote: post #102
dopamean wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know plenty of people who despite really, really disliking Donald Trump were very put off by the public discussion of the "pee tape" stuff. They called it kink shaming and said that on its own it shouldn't matter if that is the kind of stuff the President is into. I tend to agree and I think a lot of other sensible people do too.

The Pee Tape is an issue because the Racist President had prostitutes pee on a bed that the Black President slept on. That is what the issue is with the Pee Tape. It is not about kink or anything else, just a racist doing racist stuff.

I think it's less about race and more about embarrassment. He seems to have deep-seated psychological issues that are being triggered by having been mocked at the correspondent's dinner. I'm not sure how he felt about Obama before, but he has become obsessed with fighting back and undoing everything Obama did just on principle -- regardless of whether he otherwise likes or agrees with the policy.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#130

Post by LeifCarrotson »

anpat wrote: post #46
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook's moderation team faces far different incentives and consequences than you when checking if an account is spam. Which is worse - a false positive, or a false negative? Facebook would rather leave 999 false profiles up and not accidentally close 1 genuine profile that just happens to look spammy. From their perspective, ruining someone's Facebook experience by deleting their account is worse than letting ever…

I am sure I will sound naive to you but what do you mean by AWS accounts here?

Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing service which, to put it briefly, allows you to run websites. You could have a physical server rack in a datacenter near you, or spin up some servers on AWS (or Google Cloud, or Azure).

A lot of very large companies use it, including a lot of Fortune 500s for their ordinary company websites, as well as major web apps like Netflix, Reddit, Pinterest, Spotify, etc. And of course Amazon itself.

Now, those listed sites probably would get a call if something were to happen, but too many HN startups are running on AWS accounts linked to the founder's gmail and personal shopping account. Imagine if a dispute over a return of some counterfeit junk bought on Amazon by some CTO suddenly took down all of Netflix...

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