<story><title>Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/technology/facebook-fake-accounts.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>menacingly</author><text>I get that facebook my have complicated motives here, but I don&amp;#x27;t know that &amp;quot;easy to spot&amp;quot; is a good yardstick.&lt;p&gt;First, there are the countless instances where something is trivial for a single person to suss out that doesn&amp;#x27;t scale.&lt;p&gt;Second, and perhaps most importantly, I don&amp;#x27;t think simple hunches about fake accounts are really actionable here. Having an account that &amp;quot;originated in the Middle East&amp;quot; that now presents as an &amp;quot;attractive woman&amp;quot; is not really a clear-cut case for having your account terminated.&lt;p&gt;I get that we really really want to be able to draw a hard line between people who behave in &amp;quot;weird&amp;quot; ways and organized influence attempts, but I don&amp;#x27;t think we can get there. It&amp;#x27;s starting to sound like &amp;quot;bots&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;fake news&amp;quot; have disagreeable opinions baked into the definition.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jmcqk6</author><text>&amp;gt;First, there are the countless instances where something is trivial for a single person to suss out that doesn&amp;#x27;t scale.&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting argument to me.  It&amp;#x27;s basically conceding a shittier solution, because we &amp;quot;can&amp;#x27;t scale&amp;quot; the effective one.  As we talk more and more about automation, I think this is similar to what we&amp;#x27;ve seen in meat space with things like tools.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve heard so many people complain about chinese hammers or socket wrenches (though I also know there are quality chinese tools out there) or many other examples.  Things mass produced cheaply are lesser quality, but we&amp;#x27;re willing to make the trade off as a society because we get things for cheaper.&lt;p&gt;And now we see this in the information economy. Even though we know a human doing this work would be much more effective, we&amp;#x27;re not going to do it because the cost is too high.</text></comment>
<story><title>Facebook Says It’s Policing Fake Accounts, but They’re Still Easy to Spot</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/technology/facebook-fake-accounts.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>menacingly</author><text>I get that facebook my have complicated motives here, but I don&amp;#x27;t know that &amp;quot;easy to spot&amp;quot; is a good yardstick.&lt;p&gt;First, there are the countless instances where something is trivial for a single person to suss out that doesn&amp;#x27;t scale.&lt;p&gt;Second, and perhaps most importantly, I don&amp;#x27;t think simple hunches about fake accounts are really actionable here. Having an account that &amp;quot;originated in the Middle East&amp;quot; that now presents as an &amp;quot;attractive woman&amp;quot; is not really a clear-cut case for having your account terminated.&lt;p&gt;I get that we really really want to be able to draw a hard line between people who behave in &amp;quot;weird&amp;quot; ways and organized influence attempts, but I don&amp;#x27;t think we can get there. It&amp;#x27;s starting to sound like &amp;quot;bots&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;fake news&amp;quot; have disagreeable opinions baked into the definition.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>marcinzm</author><text>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&amp;#x27;s non-viable. Remember that at Facebooks scale a 1% false-positive rate means 20 MILLION accounts. That&amp;#x27;s too much to even try sending for manual review.</text></comment>