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The fake Facebook profile industry

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Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#221

Post by WhitneyLand »

Tech-Noir wrote: post #199
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…

> Judge [Louis CK’s] apology/non apology anyway you like, at least he ended it decisively, instead of propagating it for enternity by sowing doubt. What are you talking about? It was "ended" by the NYT publishing, in this current Weinstein/Spacey climate, an article about his offences[1] and leaving him absolutely no other choice but to finally come clean. He was publicly painting his victims as liars (which you quit…

That’s the whole point, they don’t have to ever admit it, regardless of the publicity, short of hidden camera footage.

The huge problem is, that even when it’s damning enough that 99% of people call bullshit, their denial will continue to cause great pain and make it difficult for other people to get justice in the future.

In a perfect world they wouldn’t have committed the crimes in the first place, but it’s a relative scale, and having an uncontested documented case is a bigger win over a denial, than having a good apology is over a bad/non apology.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#222

Post by prostoalex »

jaaames wrote: post #217

How does the SEC not crack down on Facebook misleading investors around the number of "active" users?

It’s a secondary metric and investors only carry about the revenue/profit. (Look at Snap, whose user count is growing, and stock price is not).

And since FB advertisers are paying for engagement, not impressions, the amount of ad fraud is likely insignificant.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#223

Post by prostoalex »

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.

> Fake profiles still count towards ad-revenue

How? Unless the fake profiles manage to generate significant amount of ad fraud along the way, the advertisers still end up paying for actions, not impressions.

Why would an operator of a fraudulent network click on ads, sign up for third-party newsletters, install promoted mobile apps or do whatever else the dominant ad unit in his/her feed would promote?

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#224

Post by prostoalex »

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…

Out-of-band verifications are kinda cumbersome in real life. Let’s say a profile claiming to be your college friend, or a coworker from three jobs ago sends you a friend request on Facebook - will you really go out of your way to email/call/visit them to verify the account is theirs and not an impostor’s?

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#225

Post by refurb »

rconti wrote: post #129
mullen wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wasn't the bed-peeing incident completely made up? Some guy was paid to create a Russian dossier which was later discredited.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#226

Post by friendzis »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #108
throwawaykite wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really sorry to hear about your ordeal — I was once wrongly accused by a woman of something heinous and it took me a while to recover from the shock and PTSD. In particular this part of your post bothers me: “The experience haunts me to this day..” No - This shouldn’t be the case. You did nothing wrong. While there is no magic wand to “fix” how you feel - and esp low probability that an online post from a stranger wo…

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…

In some small country there was recently a very interesting story. A relatively unknown actress made a post to her Facebook feed accusing relatively famous director of sexual assault without any details given (I was sexually assaulted by X, it still haunts me, #MeMoo). On Friday evening. On monday morning, one relatively strong politician with PhD in law decided to question organisations' under their influence cooperation with said director. The stated motive was that several days of public silence under such a heavy accusations is unacceptable. Politician with PhD in law states that innocent until proven guilty is a concept from criminal law, which is orthogonal to moral code.

This scares me. With this huge stream of information (disregarding signal to noise ration) stories lose "longevity" - lifetimes of stories are getting shorter and shorter and there is less and less time to react. Collecting facts for good rebuttal takes time and for trickier cases may take so long that publishing a good rebuttal backed with facts is like beating a dead horse. People tend to react to public outcry. Everyday we see a new mass hysteria, which is just perfect place to spread fake news and propaganda.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#227

Post by fnl »

koolba wrote: post #158
fnl wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in an era when the truth is so easy to distort, what should you believe? What makes you think that in some time before it was easier to find the truth?

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

Hmm. We do get more information, obviously, but I am not sure that means the ratio of true or correct information over false or incorrect information has changed. Formerly, there have been far more myths and lore around that are easier to falsify today, so this goes both ways.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#228

Post by Spearchucker »

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...…

"I dislike that we have to be so Victorian about sex. It's the social climate we live in, but... Why?"

It's religion. It teaches roughly 4 bn† people that sex is dirty, that nakedness is shameful, and that talking about it's acts and/or requisite body parts is taboo.

† According to Wikipedia 2.4 billion Christians, and 1.6 billion Muslims.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#229

Post by Tech-Noir »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #221
Tech-Noir wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Judge [Louis CK’s] apology/non apology anyway you like, at least he ended it decisively, instead of propagating it for enternity by sowing doubt. What are you talking about? It was "ended" by the NYT publishing, in this current Weinstein/Spacey climate, an article about his offences[1] and leaving him absolutely no other choice but to finally come clean. He was publicly painting his victims as liars (which you quit…

That’s the whole point, they don’t have to ever admit it, regardless of the publicity, short of hidden camera footage. The huge problem is, that even when it’s damning enough that 99% of people call bullshit, their denial will continue to cause great pain and make it difficult for other people to get justice in the future. In a perfect world they wouldn’t have committed the crimes in the first place, but it’s a relat…

> having an uncontested documented case is a bigger win over a denial

I agree. The mistake is crediting that to CK ("at least he...") when in the wake of an article as damning as the one in the NYT, in the current climate where the story was not going to go away, as before, he had absolutely no other option than admit it.

> That’s the whole point, they don’t have to ever admit it, regardless of the publicity, short of hidden camera footage.

I think that was true before (pre-Weinstein), and will unfortunately probably become true again, but right now there is too much attention being paid to showbiz abuse/harrassment for someone to get away with ignoring/denying truthful allegations against them.

Re: The fake Facebook profile industry

#230

Post by avenius »

exodust wrote: post #210
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…

To be fair this sounds more like phishing. I would assume emails from facebook came from the facebook.com domain.
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