USA TODAY asks FBI to probe rise in fake Facebook followers

[tangor]

The parent company of USA TODAY said it had asked the FBI to investigate a wave of fake Facebook accounts so large it accounted for half of the newspaper’s following on the social media platform.

Facebook purged millions of those fake accounts from USA TODAY and other publishers three weeks ago, the latest salvo in the social giant’s battle against scammers and spammers seeking access to its platform and its 1.94 billion users.

[usatoday.com...]

The fake followers and users remain in the news, and FB still has a problem to deal with. So far no truly malicious activity has occurred .... but it sure messes with statistics!

No word if the FBI will look into this.

[NickMNS]

I would not be surprised if 50% of all of FB's accounts are fake.

This USA Today article goes hand in hand with the CBS 60 minutes piece here:
[cbsnews.com...]

from March that showed how fake news creators could buy Facebook and Twitter accounts in bulk and then use them to inflate likes to in turn prop-up the Fake stories in peoples feeds.

[tangor]

The subject FB does not want in play is how many REAL users are registered. Their entire bottom line is the number of eyeballs they can sell to advertisers. Zuck and co are admitting as many as 1% of their 1.94 billion users are "misclassified", ie, fake or not human. Most reasonable folks have a great deal of skepticism in that number, though I doubt that 50% is realistic either.

[NickMNS]

Okay maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but at the same time there are services where you can by accounts by the thousands, aged accounts. If you can buy accounts in the thousands that means that the seller must be holding an inventory of accounts in the millions, more likely in the tens of millions. In terms of orders of magnitude tens of millions is not far off of a billion. There are probably several parties selling these services not to mentions spammers using similar techniques for their own gain.

[tangor]

Millions is chump change when talking billions.

Spending $1000 a day, every day, whether you need to or not, it would take 2.7 years to spend a million bucks. It would take 2700 years to spend a billion.

However, in the USA Today case, dropping from a high of 15M down to (when all is said and done) 6.5M, THAT is significant.