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The fake Facebook profile industry

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Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#201

Post by [deleted] »

emodendroket wrote: post #140
WhitneyLand wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your situation is very much connected to the current wave of revelations of wrong doing against (mostly) women. Every time one of these celebrities denies a true accusation it causes a whole new wave of damage not only to the victim but, to every person who will ever have to fend off a wrongful accusation, because it muddies the waters and creates FUD. Yes, the data suggests the percentage of false accusation…

I recall reading that something like one in ten people on death row ends up being acquitted, so the idea that only a small percentage of people are wrongly executed is factually wrong in the first place.

[deleted]

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#202

Post by emodendroket »

CaptSpify wrote: post #197
emodendroket wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but if the information is obviously bogus will advertisers keep paying? I don't think deleting fake accounts is necessarily an easy problem. Particularly when we consider that a false positive is much worse than a false negative as far as user impact goes.

> OK, but if the information is obviously bogus will advertisers keep paying? Apparently yes. It's no secret that FB's numbers are not accurate, but they are still making a ton of money. > I don't think deleting fake accounts is necessarily an easy problem. Particularly when we consider that a false positive is much worse than a false negative as far as user impact goes. Nobody said it was easy. Only that FB is incen…

> Nobody said it was easy. Only that FB is incentivised to do detection poorly. FB doesn't really care about user impact, they only care about profit. If it's not enough user impact to cause a dent in profit, they aren't incentivised to care.

I think you've misunderstood my point (or perhaps glossed over it). From a UX perspective, it's way, way worse to delete a real person's account and tell them they're fake (tons of negative news coverage every time these screw-ups happen) than it is to let a fake account slide. So any technique that errs on the side of being too aggressive they are unlikely to use.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#203

Post by cwkoss »

wepple wrote: post #155
MarkPNeyer wrote: post #125

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…

I don’t see this working. Too many people on Facebook accept friend requests from unknown people already for it to work. I guess you could have some kind of “have you actually met this person in real life” test, but that’s an annoying friction, and people seem to enjoy inflating “friends” regardless.

Also breaks as soon as anyone in your graph gets their password stolen.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#204

Post by Retric »

RepressedEmu wrote: post #164
koolba wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prior to the internet and social media there was less noise, hence a higher signal to noise ratio.

I presume that holds unless the only "signal" you get is your local priest and feudal lord? Especially since for most of human civilization the vast majority(95%+) couldn't read or write...

Presumably people have gossiped for about as long as they have been able to speak. However, the 'truth content' of the average communication seems very low.

Take something as simple a speed limit sign. That sign is not literally 'true', it simply refers to what the calculation for penalties will be based if you exceed the unstated actual speed limit. Reporting is at best a game of telephone, social media ends up so many hops from what actually happens to be nearly completely separated from reality.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#205

Post by everybodyknows »

tmpz22 wrote: post #131

Throwaway to share a valuable perspective. My dad is a chronic target for scammers, and falls for them at a rate where I can only think it intentional on some level. He'll allow fake MSPs to install programs as root, on the same machine he does banking and legal on. He'll call numbers when strange javascript alerts tell him he has a virus. He'll then pay people to "remove" said malware, giving them full access to the…

I'd start looking for an attorney who's familiar with elder abuse situations and can tell you about your options. If you can gather the right evidence, something can be done.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#206

Post by Trundle »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #69
abtom wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's shocking how easy it is to become a liar without missing a beat. If they slipped and someone caught them lying, it would become exponentially worse. Bad idea. But they should be proud of their sexuality. Whether it's BDSM or hotwifing or whatever strange kink, who cares? It's the same as shaming someone for being gay. I dislike that we have to be so Victorian about sex. It's the social climate we live in, but...…

>who cares?

A significant amount of people with power to negatively affect your career.

Relevant to the mention of bdsm and tech, Larry Garfield a fairly prominent person within the Drupal industry, got banished after his fetlife (or similar website maybe) account got exposed and spread around.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#207

Post by emodendroket »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #170
WilsonPhillips wrote: post #117

Is this something that the blockchain could help with? Seems to me that a scalable method of authentication would be a real asset to solving the problem.

> Is this something that the blockchain could help with? The answer to every problem isn't "blockchain". Sometimes it is "Rust". And, difficult as it may be to believe, sometimes the problem has no technical solution at all. Hold on for one more day and things will go your way.

If those don't cut it try Big Data.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#208

Post by Tsagadai »

CaptSpify wrote: post #78
denisehilton wrote: post #74

It's about time Facebook should start taking action against fake profile. They should make use of AI to separate them out.

They have every incentive to do the opposite though. Fake profiles still count towards ad-revenue because advertisers aren't calling Facebook out on their bullshit.

More to that I think some advertisers benefit from a known gullible community. It would be quite easy (and unethical) for someone to make money out of targeted ads piggybacking on this sort of network.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#209

Post by everybodyknows »

grownseed wrote: post #82

Facebook recently started sending me notifications that somebody unknown was trying to log into my account, that they'd temporarily blocked it, and later re-enabled it. The emails actually come from Facebook, the problem is that the email address they're contacting me on is one I've never used for Facebook. The email contains a link to log into Facebook to "fix" the situation, but I obviously can't log in. The other…

Doesn't this mean that someone at one time had access to your Email account at one time, in order to register a Facebook account with it? I would ask myself how much of my email history might have been compromised.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#210

Post by exodust »

cm2187 wrote: post #188

I deleted my facebook app since half of the posts in my feed were fake anyway. Facebook disguises ads as friend's share and likes, even when it is obvious that a particular friend would never like a corporate page. They even pushed the bad taste by making my deceased father (who's account we didn't think to delete) like things after he passed. So if you add fake profiles to that... As a note, I hadn't received an ema…

Even worse, Facebook seems to allow people to open an account using someone else's email address. I've never had a FB account yet occasionally I get emails from 'facebookmail.com' addressing me by a woman's name (I'm a man) and pestering me with friend suggestions of people I've never heard of. My email has never been compromised, yet Facebook spams it with the assumption I'm part of their network. I will never join their pile of shit spam den, and have never clicked on anything in the emails they send.
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