Slashdot Mirror
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.
Now if Facebook would just disable the other 2.2 billion accounts, we'd be getting somewhere.
What do you call 583 million deleted Facebook accounts? A good start!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
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.
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.
1) The information is that interesting if you're doing A.I. research or market research for advertising, or A.I. research for market research for advertising.
2) Direct access to a communications channel with millions/billions of verified real humans constitutes indirect access to a vastly more interesting bottomless trove of data for anyone doing the types of things mentioned above in point #1.
Not that they care. They have a shadow profile on you already.
I have at least 4 fake Facebook profiles. Every time I need to log in to one of those idiotic sites that uses facebook to authenticate, I create another fake facebook account and use it to sign up. (It helps that I have a domain that I can send any email I want to). I just intercept the first email to verify the account and then blackhole the address. I do not have a "real" facebook account, as I dont use the service, but i would be willing to bet that facebook considers each and every one of my accounts to be "active" since they are all used to regularly authenticate various things.
My wife has at least two accounts that I know of, and probably at least one more that I don't
Given all of that, and the fact that facebook is wiping out 100 million fake accounts a month and has never wiped any of mine, I have to wonder how many real accounts they actually have? 1 Billion, 500 miillion, 100 million? I would be willing to bet that they even know how many real accounts there are, but go to great lengths to hide the reality from their advertisers as this would collapse their revenue pretty quick. Even having to admit that they only had 500 million real users instead of 2 billion would take a very large chunk off their advertising revenue and put their stock into free fall.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted