Re:Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re St...
by skinnymuch on Monday November 06, 2017 @11:23PM
(#15641070)
But sometimes people create a second account or an account for some odd reason that isn't directly obviously them. But they'll properly use those accounts. Do you just ban these accounts too? Accounts not doing any harm and potentially being beneficial to certain things like FB group participation or posts.
Finally, if they act like real users since they are, it helps Facebook's bottom line. Booting them would hurt FB and piss off those people.
This is just one example of "fake accounts"
Re:Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re St...
by wpietri on Tuesday November 07, 2017 @04:27PM
(#15647812)
They could handle that use in a few ways. The easiest would be to tie the second account back to the first, so that FB knows but nobody else does. But presumably people are doing that for a reason, and the real solution is to create a feature for one's main account that accommodates that reason. And banning is not an unreasonable solution. Facebook is demonstrably ok with losing small amounts of marginal traffic, especially if that helps limit abuse. Their number one asset is trust, and anything that chips away at that trust is extremely dangerous for them.
Re:Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re St...
by skinnymuch on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @10:59AM
(#15653673)
Maybe people don't want the two accounts associated? Or then they might accidentally post in the wrong one? That can already happen but the blame lies entirely on the user right now.
I do agree there are likely solutions like you're saying. Pages already work that way. Linked to a personal profile. Multiple can be.
Though I guess it likely isn't in Facebook's interest to do a feature like you propose if they can help it. If they can ban enough actual worthless or hurting fake accounts without messing with fake accounts that are being used legitimately enough. Since that boosts their numbers.
Facebook knows with absolute certainty if an account is legit or not.
Cambridge Analytics, Lexis/Nexus (nee Seisent), ChoicePoint (oops, bought by Lexis/Nexus), Palantir, NSA, and others have all uniquely identitied every person, living or dead.
Facebook has even more data. Facebook even has phantom profiles for people without accounts. Of course they know who's legit. They can't not know.
Just like Facebook juices their ad numbers, they're lying here too.
Frankly, I'm shocked, shocked that Facebook would lie about their culpability here.
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Twitter might plausibly not know. So they can contract with any of the dozen of 3rd parties that provide demographic databases as a service.