How are there so many fake Facebook accounts? Does anyone at Facebook even try to filter these things out? How much of your ad revenue is from bogus accounts? So ridiculous. I get friend requests all the time from clearly fake accounts. Also trying to look up people matched on Tinder noticed that for some particular names it’s like every other person in the search results is fake. Not to mention how many fake Tinder accounts there are which comes from Facebook’s weak filter. The filter isn’t even that complicated right now. There are 2 obvious indicators to flag an account. <10 photos with 90% uploaded on the same day. <200 friends that correlate only by language e.g. Profile from Portugal living in London but friends from Angola + Brazil. There are probably so many other patterns on top of this that machine learning could pick up on to make it very accurate.
I have 7 facebook accounts myself, so yeah, they do happen. And I use 3 of them regularly.
But... why
Everybody does it
Yo come to fb and help us fight it
TIL that my profile is fake
No one at FB has ever thought of this before. BTW great strategy for flagging almost every new FB user.
The challenge is that these fake account behavior is similar to the behavior of real new accounts or accounts made by people who lost their password. You can’t block them all without serious false positives, so it’s better to tolerate and down rank fake profiles instead.
+1. Even a small % of false positives can be in the millions.
Wow, we’ve never thought of this! I’m telling the team right now. You just got a lot of people promoted.
The tech challenge is non trivial and we don’t want to falsely block authentic users.
Holy crap, I’m going to flag this for Zuck tomorrow. I think we can probably write some automation tomorrow and have it running perfectly by Friday. OP, amazing job on the robust analysis. Would you prefer a role in our Data Science org, or maybe just run the entire business strategy?
Too late, OP has already been tapped to be zucks replacement.
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Why would they filter the accounts out? It would hurt their numbers... Hard! When advertisers finally figure out this whole industry is bots looking at ads, make sure your stock is in good hands.