Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

121–124 of 124 posts

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

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, esp…

Maybe people don't want the two accounts associated? Or then they might accidentally post in the wrong one? That can already happen but the blame lies entirely on the user right now.

I do agree there are likely solutions like you're saying. Pages already work that way. Linked to a personal profile. Multiple can be.

Though I guess it likely isn't in Facebook's interest to do a feature like you propose if they can help it. If they can ban enough actual worthless or hurting fake accounts without messing with fake accounts that are being used legitimately enough. Since that boosts their numbers.

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no reason that users should consider random words on random Facebook accounts any differently than words posted on 4chan. You're right! They're both dangerous. If I posted your public address on both of those websites, how you would you feel about your own safety? Not your Facebook account mind you - just somewhere on Facebook. That's unsafe speech. Other examples of text where being associated with safety…

> You're conflating a regulation of speech one disagrees with, with hate speech. I'm not calling for regulation, nor labeling anything "hate speech" (ergo not conflating the two, either), so I have no idea where this particular statement of yours is coming from. What I'm saying is that trusting sites where anybody can post anything is the core danger of the situations instigating this specific mess, and that trust is…

Ah I slightly misunderstood your position - I apologize. Personally I find the topics highly related in my mind and so my mind made a jump in your argument I should not have.

I do actually still disagree with you though:

> At its core is the observation that people let Facebook content influence their finances and politics; the demonstrable dump of people's unthinking, reactionary blurted opinions, and their personal or incentivized proselytizing/propagandist/marketing skews. These are the random words of random accounts, all unworthy of blind trust.

Personally I don't think that people are actually putting blind trust into such sources. Rather, Facebook is instead creating a narrative about how the world is rather than what is truth and what is a lie. I don't think that Facebook is incredibly influential because people put blind faith into it. There's definitely a lot of people who do that, and they're dumb, but I think there's a larger problem at play.

Facebook is able to create a narrative about what "the world" is like. If you're liberal, you see a very different "world" on Facebook than if you're conservative. In this way, I don't think Facebook is influencing the world via trust, but by misconstruing what the world actually looks like. People have the perception that Facebook is an "unbiased" perspective on the world at large and especially your social circle. But we know that Facebook doesn't actually present such a world - it instead gives you a highly "biased" (think more of the statistical version than the political one) perspective on life.

In this way I think it's not necessary to make Facebook the arbitrator of trust on their network, but instead to require them to arbitrate the way information is disseminated.

To say it simpler: It's not a problem that Facebook has fake news, it's a problem that Facebook can create a fake world.

Again sorry for misunderstanding you.

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

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

This article isn't about "human trust" in general, nor how you socialize with your known peers. It's quite specifically about sources that are otherwise completely unknown to you affecting your finances and opinions by pursuing magnified exposure on Facebook. This isn't my distinction, it's what the article raises as a problem.

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

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're conflating a regulation of speech one disagrees with, with hate speech. I'm not calling for regulation, nor labeling anything "hate speech" (ergo not conflating the two, either), so I have no idea where this particular statement of yours is coming from. What I'm saying is that trusting sites where anybody can post anything is the core danger of the situations instigating this specific mess, and that trust is…

Ah I slightly misunderstood your position - I apologize. Personally I find the topics highly related in my mind and so my mind made a jump in your argument I should not have. I do actually still disagree with you though: > At its core is the observation that people let Facebook content influence their finances and politics; the demonstrable dump of people's unthinking, reactionary blurted opinions, and their personal…

It's cool.

I would further dig into the intentionality of who's creating what. Facebook creates a platform where people can be surrounded by very selective & similar feeds, fed by producers of content seeking to gain traction of their ideas as described in the article (ie seeking sales or political power). To say that Facebook creates these narratives can sound like people at the company are intentionally crafting these narratives, instead of it being a substrate where 3rd parties craft them.

However, let's contrast this with TV, since it also has the creation of narratives and the problem of getting too sucked into it. Different networks have their different slants, people pick their favorites and get wrapped up in the narratives presented there, be they from news or from consistent themes permeating entertainment programming.

But for some reason the response to getting too wrapped up in TV (your fault, watch less or get off it completely) is quite different than the responses to getting too wrapped up in Facebook (regulate Facebook and don't change our habits!). I think the responsibility of the info consumer is the same in either case, and a lot of that is related to how you handle trust vs skepticism regarding these commercial outlets.

Post reply on HN