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.

Comments

"I'll be back" said the sock puppet!

[shanen]

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.))