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Facebook Deleted 583 Million Fake Accounts in the First Three Months of 2018 (cnet.com)
Facebook said Tuesday that it had removed more than half a billion fake accounts and millions of pieces of other violent, hateful or obscene content over the first three months of 2018. From a report: In a blog post on Facebook, Guy Rosen, Facebook's vice president of product management, said the social network disabled about 583 million fake accounts during the first three months of this year -- the majority of which, it said, were blocked within minutes of registration. That's an average of over 6.5 million attempts to create a fake account every day from Jan. 1 to March 31. Facebook boasts 2.2 billion monthly active users, and if Facebook's AI tools didn't catch these fake accounts flooding the social network, its population would have swelled immensely in just 89 days.
that would be a good start
Now if Facebook would just disable the other 2.2 billion accounts, we'd be getting somewhere.
Thanks for the news, but I gotta say I hate CNet's habit of throwing you an auto play video every time you click on a link. I'm on a slow wi-fi network and just closing the floating window doesn't stop the audio, which you can't pause until the embedded video is loaded and you find it. I wonder why they keep being this annoying. I was a fan of their website before that but then I turned my back to them because I felt like they didn't care about User Experience at all. Feels good speaking about it.
What about the shadow profiles? Are these part of the "fake" accounts or is that separate?
I also considered "NOT a real penalty" as the Subject.
So let's start with the question of "Why?"
Because a fresh fake identity is extremely valuable. It starts out with the polite respect most of us accord to any stranger. The sock puppet loses nothing by getting nuked, but polite and civil discourse was destroyed first.
Solution approach: Use EPR (Earned Public Reputation) to make fake identities less valuable. Actually, the default visibility setting can be calibrated against the number of fake identities that are being created (among other factors). If visibility has to be earned by sustained niceness and if bad behaviors are remembered and suitably penalized (with reduced visibility), then the social environment would be greatly improved.
Yes, even on Slashdot. One way to think of EPR is as enhanced karma with teeth attached.
ADSAuPR, atAJG, but even better if you have a better solution or solution approach to discuss. The typical responses on Slashdot these years are just bits of shallow snark, sometimes followed by a trickle of ideas worth thinking about...
(I increasingly feel that's yet another time-related problem, mostly caused by the uniform cycle time of the top page. One solution there would be variable descent speeds, with more significant stories falling more slowly--but that presumes Slashdot had an economic model that actually supported sustained improvement. ( in Japanese.))
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
This assumes that account creation rate is independent of the account deletion rate, with no justification and for no particular reason, other than to cap the submission summary text with a de rigueur derf derf.
When they asked me to provide an ID with my fake name(nickname), I made a fake ID in photoshop, took a picture of it and sent it, now my fake name account is verified as legit.
At last, a way to truly delete your profile from Facebook!
but I don't use them so I don't know
All their trolling and stalking accounts have been deleted, oh noes! xD xD xD
You know, before they got strict.
I never use it, but it makes me happy to know I got one over on them.
All the spammers and fake accounts I have reported have were mnaully checked and allowed to exists. I don't believe they act on user complaints.
That's an average of over 6.5 million attempts to create a fake account every day from Jan. 1 to March 31.
Why? the information on Facebook isn't _THAT_ interesting.
If visibility has to be earned by sustained niceness and if bad behaviors are remembered and suitably penalized (with reduced visibility), then the social environment would be greatly improved.
"Bad behavior" means different things to different people. There's misinformation - but good luck proving it. You can all the cites in the world still won't convince people that your facts are right or wrong.
And then there's just personal opinion. I think BOTH belief in God and belief that there are more than two genders is nonsense. Which means that both Conservatives AND Liberals hate me - vehemently disagree with me at the very least. (People with those beliefs* have nothing but their feelings to back their arguments.)
I'd be flagged in a heart beat - and I can back up my opinions with rational arguments.
*Belief - opinion not based on facts.
So If I should direct my AI chat bot at Faceplant and they don't delete the account does it pass the Turing test?
Once account is created I could then start feeding it fake information on location, web browsing, nose picking, slashdot posts, personal interactions, take out orders, credit reports and a plethora of other useless information to maintain my bots humanist endeavor.
Or is this the bot?
Muhahahahaha
If visibility has to be earned by sustained niceness and if bad behaviors are remembered and suitably penalized (with reduced visibility), then the social environment would be greatly improved.
That sounds suspiciously like the suppression of free speech.
Instead of enforcing some nebulous universal value-of-people, why not let individuals choose what they would like to see and hear?
That way I can listen to whoever I want, and you don't have to concern yourself with whether the person I'm listening to has good social standing or not.
How many of them were accounts that had the "wrong" opinion?
[Disclaimer: I've never used Facebook, and I never will because I'm a very private person.]
You make it sound like people are subscribing to random people they don't know. Why would anyone do that? Subscribe to your friends' feeds, and subscribe to reputable local and global news sites. Just don't subscribe to "all" or "popular" or whatever Facebook calls the giant mash-up of everyone yelling over each other, and you won't have to worry about fake news being boosted by sock puppet accounts.
There seem to be three primary candidates as explanations for your reply:
(1) You didn't understand what I wrote, but can't figure out how to write a relevant or useful question.
(2) You have infinite time and don't care how you spend it.
(3) You had nothing to say, but had to say something.
In Case (1), please feel free to ask for clarification. I certainly have to acknowledge being a poor writer. Too easy for me to think the implications are obvious even when the local context is insufficient. One of the secrets of good writing is to figure out how much context is required. Or perhaps I'm just a tad insensitive to the delicate sensibilities of the Slashdot audience?
Case (2) would be delusional, but you might be religious along those conventional lines.
In Case (3), too much said already.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
And everyone of those was some hot looking girl who wanted to be my special friend.....
Pretty hilarious. And some of my Russian friends complain their accounts got deleted bahahaha FB is a bunch of fucktards.
No one needs that garbage.
"Facebook boasts 2.2 billion monthly active users, and if Facebook's AI tools didn't catch these fake accounts flooding the social network, its population would have swelled immensely in just 89 days."
I have ~four Facebook accounts but only three I keep track of but I use them over each others as I get banned and Facebook definitely haven't removed any of them meaning they let me have at-least three accounts.
From the part about one could kinda see some speculation about how 600 million more accounts on top of 2.2 billion would be a large increase but either Facebook see my three(+) accounts as unique active accounts and if so 2.2 billion become off from the real user-base with people like me (we may not be all that many, but yeah, as far as numbers goes there's plenty of "fake" already) or they have figured out I'm one and the same person but let me be and if so they aren't counting all the accounts.
I guess maybe they do count all my accounts but if so that just mean Facebook have a smaller user base than what they say.
Unfortunately, not all of the content FB deleted or blocked was in violation of their policies. Facebook routinely blocks users for posting non-violating images that depict same-sex affection or suggest homoeroticism. Even just posting links to web sites that include homoerotic images will get you blocked. That's because their censors are often from homophobic cultures that judge LGBT people by a different standard. Meanwhile, obvious hetero porn spam accounts are left untouched, because who in Facebook's Community Standards department doesn't like a little pussy-rubbing video?
How do you delete a fake account? A fake account would be something that looks like an account, but it's not really an account.
Oh, wait. I get it.
It's not a fake account, it's a (fake Facebook) account. So, all those people who have real accounts at a fake Facebook now have lost their accounts, whether or not they they were tricked into creating it or they did so in protest against Facebook.
So, how did Facebook get access to the account database at fake Facebook?
PS: Can we please use the word "fake" correctly? I keep reading about people buying e.g. fake USB sticks. Then when you read the article, it turns out it wasn't a fake USB stick at all, it was a real USB stick with a fake logo. Except that one guy who actually received a USB connector cut from a USB-cable that was glued into a plastic shell, making it look like a USB stick.
Oh, you mean anything that questions the LEFT wing totalitarianism we live under...
And still,
fake linus torvalds accounts persist on facebook.
Facebook has been quietly changing up the UI in web and mobile, removing options to report fake profiles. Gee, I wonder why. For example, in Message Requests now, you can't even opt to see the profile, much less report it as fake.