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Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

bbc.co.uk

121–130 of 167 posts

Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#121

Facebook has laughably weak moderation. Twitter, despite having stricter moderation (which seldom seems to result in consequences), seems to have an even bigger problem. An election in a certain country (I'm wary of even mentioning the name of that country, lest I be bombarded) exposed a huge army of dubious accounts shutting down dissent. In another country, a network of Twitter bots attempted to start a race war. T…

Moderation is an extremely hard problem to deal with well. Have you ever attempted to manage a community?

Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#122

Facebook has laughably weak moderation. Twitter, despite having stricter moderation (which seldom seems to result in consequences), seems to have an even bigger problem. An election in a certain country (I'm wary of even mentioning the name of that country, lest I be bombarded) exposed a huge army of dubious accounts shutting down dissent. In another country, a network of Twitter bots attempted to start a race war. T…

Moderation is an extremely hard problem to deal with well. Have you ever attempted to manage a community?

There are over two billion people on there. How about paying their users for finding and reporting content? A reputation system to find and pay trustworthy people to clean up. Thereby delegating the task back to the scale where it belongs, some money and incentives too.

Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#123
post #76
post #70

They didn't catch the 3 fake profiles I set up on Facebook. I've not used them for five or more years, but I checked recently and they are still there and still let me log in without so much as a "where you been". They all have obviously fake names and were used only for testing advertising at various times in the past.

My cat still has her account. Granted, she’s not posting political bullshit or trolling. In fact she hasn’t even logged in for something like five years, but she obviously didn’t setup the account herself.

I’d ask my dog to friend her but my dog doesn’t like cats very much.

Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#124
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since posting is not possible without installing the app, I never posted anything You can post from eg desktop Chrome, without using the app. I routinely do this since I don't like installing FB apps on my phone. I often edit photos on my desktop prior to uploading, so it's just plain convenient. Sign in on the desktop with Chrome. Go to your default home page (the person body icon). Right mouse click -> inspect pa…

Would resizing the window smaller do the same?

Haven't tested but moving to resposive might trigger a user agent change.

Can the same be done on FF?

Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#125
post #95

Holy moly! I thought FB only had that many users to begin with. When FB announces user counts I assume they include bots to bolster the numbers and only a few years back the number was ~1 billion??

You might be confusing their reported numbers with total inactive accounts. They regularly report their Monthly Active Users which have been >1B recently.

I was confused in the same way and thought the 2B+ accounts figure usually reported was total accounts.

So how many accounts, active or inactive, bots or humans, are there in total?

Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be confusing their reported numbers with total inactive accounts. They regularly report their Monthly Active Users which have been >1B recently.

I was confused in the same way and thought the 2B+ accounts figure usually reported was total accounts. So how many accounts, active or inactive, bots or humans, are there in total?

Don’t think they publicly reveal this as I’m not sure it’s relevant or important to investors/advertisers.

Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#127
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple really. 1) Ban any political figure who buys a political ad. If you set an example others will follow. 2) Facebook/Twitter/etc already have a verification mechanism and so anyone who isn't verified and using words like tax, election, vote etc can be sent to a moderation queue.

>anyone who isn't verified and using words like tax, election, vote etc can be sent to a moderation queue chuckle Do you propose that in earnest in order to save the democracy[1]? Or are you being ironic and it's simply lost on me...? What other words would you put on the moderation graylist? "Death penalty", "whistleblower", "sexual assault", "guns", "public education", "welfare", "war", "weapons of mass destruction…

He's talking about ads, not regular posts.

Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#128

Facebook has laughably weak moderation. Twitter, despite having stricter moderation (which seldom seems to result in consequences), seems to have an even bigger problem. An election in a certain country (I'm wary of even mentioning the name of that country, lest I be bombarded) exposed a huge army of dubious accounts shutting down dissent. In another country, a network of Twitter bots attempted to start a race war. T…

Moderation is an extremely hard problem to deal with well. Have you ever attempted to manage a community?

That's true, but FB is not a "community" -- its a global mass mob consiting of billions of people. Even thinking about trying to moderate something at that scale is ridiculously impossible and disengenuous.

Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#130

Facebook has laughably weak moderation. Twitter, despite having stricter moderation (which seldom seems to result in consequences), seems to have an even bigger problem. An election in a certain country (I'm wary of even mentioning the name of that country, lest I be bombarded) exposed a huge army of dubious accounts shutting down dissent. In another country, a network of Twitter bots attempted to start a race war. T…

Why don’t we just shut off the internet entirely? That’ll stop the spread of “viral garbage” for sure.
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