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

Re:Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re St... by marcinzm on Monday November 06, 2017 @12:57PM (#15637276)

The issue is also one of false-positives. Even if you could spot fake accounts 100% of the time if you also flagged 1% of legitimate accounts as fake by that approach then it's non-viable. Remember that at Facebooks scale a 1% false-positive rate means 20 MILLION accounts. That's too much to even try sending for manual review.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re St... by pbhjpbhj on Monday November 06, 2017 @02:38PM (#15638337)

Trust networks seem to work here: for example I've reported accounts like "Blacksmith Arms" (not a real example) for being not a real person. Blacksmith Arms is a common pub name, it's a business account masquerading as a user which is (or was) against Facebook rules.

Facebook responded on a couple of such reports but the accounts weren't altered.

If my account had sufficient standing then the action could have been automated. My accounts actions could then be meta-moderated by other accounts that are more trusted.

You make decisions using reports from trusted accounts, and verify them with multiple more-trusted accounts. Verified actions improve an accounts trust level.

Surely Facebook already use such a system? I imagine Google Maps are using such a trust network too?

Use the scale of the system to manage itself.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re St... by SomeStupidPoint on Monday November 06, 2017 @09:05PM (#15640549)

20 million reviews per year * 1/(2000 hours per personyear * 10 reviews per personhour) = 1000 people

Facebook could afford a thousand fulltime account reviewers, they just don't want to.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re St... by Natsu on Monday November 06, 2017 @09:52PM (#15640732)

You're implicitly assuming that manual reviews would have a 1% or better error rate. I sincerely doubt that's realistic based on what I've seen of assembly line style processes.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re St... by johansch on Monday November 06, 2017 @02:34PM (#15638305)

A manual review would cost what, a dollar at most?

That's about 1/2000th of FB's yearly revenue. They should be able to handle that.

[ Parent | on HN ]