Facebook Took Down 6.6 Billion Fake Accounts

[engine]

Facebook has a new AI, a technology it calls Deep Entity Classification (DEP), which has helped it identify and ultimately take down 6.6 billion fake accounts.

Facebook's team said that DEP has already had promising results. The tool, in the months that it has been deployed on the social network, has taken down billions of fake accounts and reduced the estimated volume of spammers and scammers by 27%. Gharbaoui said that the estimated volume of fake accounts on Facebook is now 5%.

[zdnet.com...]

That's a lot of fake accounts, which i'm sure, will continue to game the system.

[not2easy]

You have to wonder what set this in motion. Not the fake accounts, that is going to happen, but I mean deciding to take action on that huge number of accounts. They must have been around for some time. :(

[iamlost]

This reads more as a PR hack. Invoke AI with mucho filters to hide mediocre results:
* reduced the estimated volume of spammers and scammers by 27%

* the estimated volume of fake accounts on Facebook is now 5%.
A nice quick mid single digit number to mask the fact of roughly a three quarter failure rate.

If that ‘AI’ was a human employee it would receive a blistering annual review if not termination.

I’ll just bite my tongue and stay sitting in my corner; nothing untoward to see behind the green curtain, nothing untoward at all.

As to why the annual recurrence of waving a metaphorical broom: it’s spring cleaning time!

[Dimitri]

Almost as many as the World population (7.8B)

[blend27]

Deep Entity Classification!

Ah, Eh, reload...

Does sound Shmeksy Keksy though.

[thecoalman]

The amount doesn't surprise me. From my own forum about 60 to 70% of registrations are spammers the majority of which usually don't ever actually try and post something. I'm pretty good at stopping them at the front door, it could easily be in the high 90's without the various things I've implemented through the years. There was one point I was blocking about 50 per hour and it's not a large forum.

[tangor]

The evil actors work work shotgun effect: blow out as many fakes as possible and maybe one of them will have a result ... 10 critters posting 10 per hour (2400 per day) will generate 250,000 if they only work on weekends per year. (sigh)

Now think of the real number of bad actors working 24/7/365 and it is not difficult to see 6.x billion ... but that's all the more possible in that FB for most of their corporate life was desperate to cook the numbers to attract investors and advertisers ... and now the chickens have come home to roost.

(Advertisers what REAL numbers of REAL people)

Curious. Why did it take an AI to get started?

Housekeeping is good. More of it is even better. So, thumbs up!

[lucy24]

Six billion? Just how long did it take FB to figure out that they don’t really have 85% of the world’s population as active members?

[mosxu]

6 billion is not probably correct, but there was a previous article when Facebook admitted to have blocked half of its users as fake accounts. Can’t happen without their knowledge setting up a new account requires many pictures of yourself probably to use facial recognition also mobile verification.

Just wonder how many billions of impressions our ads get then !

[tangor]

Not as many as you think. FB has NOT been very good at screening their supposedly individually (and single) accounts.

One reason why I left after 14 years on the service.

The numbers never made any sense.

[Dimitri]

FB has NOT been very good

So you say. In a world were size matters, letting go something doesn't mean it's a failure or laziness...

[tangor]

Not at all! Collecting numbers is what makes FB go round!

Recently their AI discovered that some of those numbers were fake. Clean up now is very good! The biz has been built. :)

</satire>

I suspect the major push to clear the decks has more to do with potential investigations by larger entities (think government(s)) and an up coming election cycle. Consider this getting ahead of the game. In that regard, hats off!

[Essex_boy]

So how many accounts does Facebook have?

[Dimitri]

So how many accounts does Facebook have?

One for each of their employees ?

[awsoo]

I hear that on the news...

[engine]

According to the latest stats, it has 2.50 billion monthly active users.

[Dimitri]

Since the deleted accounts are spammers and scammers, I guess they were "active" , and so counted in the active users stats ?

[csdude55]

So how many accounts does Facebook have?

Based on my experience with paid ads and boosted posts, I would guess that maybe 10% of their users are real and/or active.

But I also know that the last time I ran a paid ad for a new site and targeted on specific state, Analytics showed that more than 95% of the clicks came from Moravian Falls, California. So 10% might be generous.

[engine]

Only FB knows the numbers, but whether they are true numbers, who really knows.
The scammers are relatively easy to spot when looking at them individually. I could easily imagine machine learning tagging the fake accounts and nuking them, but, they will keep on coming.

FB is a treasure trove of info for scammers.

[lucy24]

more than 95% of the clicks came from Moravian Falls, California

This is a bit unnerving, since G claims there’s no such place :(

[csdude55]

My mistake... Mountain View CA, not Moravian Falls

[lucy24]

Heh. I thought you’d mistyped “California” for “North Carolina” (or South Carolina, whichever it was). Yeah, Mountain View is definitely suspect.

[Dimitri]

Mountain View, isn't it where the Stargare is? ... No, this is Cheyenne Mountain, ... Mountain View should be where aliens are hidden anyhow...

[mcneely]

C'Mon guys .. One of the first things I learned in college was that "Looks Are 90% Of The Sale" ... If it doesn't look good, then nobody will want it.

This smoke and mirrors numbers game has been around for years.
Back in the day the search engines would brag about all of the pages (sites) they had indexed and it was quite a race to the top as far as the numbers were concerned. The bigger the numbers, the more apt the bank would be to pass out the money when it came time to finance, or refinance. Same for selling ads ... The higher the numbers being boasted, the greater the attraction would be for advertisers to throw their money at those numbers.

Here we are in 2020 and nothing has changed. Big tech bragging about all it did, does, and will do ... and for all of big techs *supposed or otherwise presumed goodness, it still can't escape it's own facade with regard to the numbers. If numbers were as important or as meaningful as big tech would want you to believe, then it wouldn't have any problem proving the actual existence of those numbers in real time and on a regular basis ... the fact that one can only really just speculate on the numbers is proof that the numbers aren't even real, and are used only to build false trust from high finance and the general public.

Google set the bar on bogus numbers clear back in 2002, and it's been a downhill metric since as it might be related to accuracy and trust.

©2002 Google - Searching 2,073,418,204 web pages

Facebook's claim to have eliminated 6.6 billion fake accounts is just an alarm bell ringing to let us in on the fact that it's headed off to the bank to get more financing.
It all has less to do with actual spammers, and more to do with money ....

[aristotle]

What is the definition of "fake account"?

Does it mean a real account that contains a "fake profile of a fictitious person"?

....
Also, although I haven't tried to do any calculations, wouldn't the process of creating 6.6 billion fake accounts consume a lot of bandwidth?

Also, wouldn't it make more sense to block these accounts from ever being created, than to have to find them and delete them after they're already created?

Anyway something on this scale is hard for me to imagine. I wonder if some kind of virus could spread through facebook and wipe out the whole site.

[csdude55]

wouldn't it make more sense to block these accounts from ever being created, than to have to find them and delete them after they're already created?

Not at all... the report they give to investors used to mainly brag about the number of accounts they had registered, and that "one billion people use Facebook in a single day":

[about.fb.com...]

So a few billion fake accounts just added to their numbers, making them look bigger and more popular than they really are. Which reflects in more people buying their stock.

Imagine how much traffic you could say your site had, if you didn't block any spambots! For most of us it would just be a waste of bandwidth and server resources, but if you sell stock based on it then it results in more money.

[lucy24]

wouldn't it make more sense to block these accounts from ever being created, than to have to find them and delete them after they're already created

I am suddenly reminded of AOL in its [e-mail] manifestation. For many years they spent half their time blocking email spammers ... and the other half encouraging anyone and everyone to get a free-trial aol email account.

[aristotle]

setting up a new account requires many pictures of yourself

For 6.6 billion fake accounts, wouldn't it consume a lot of bandwidth to upload all these images, and use a lot of space to store them.

Facebook has a new AI, a technology it calls Deep Entity Classification (DEP), which has helped it identify and ultimately take down 6.6 billion fake accounts.

Maybe this thing will run amok and decide that all the facebook accounts are fake, and then delete them.

[tangor]

Oh no! That would cause great psychological damage to all the FB addicts out there! (And there are many!)

DEP better work better than that!

</ part humor, but not by much. I know too many who live, breathe, and immerse in FB on a daily basis ... for HOURS AND HOURS at a time>

[lucy24]

I remember reading somewhere that in Nunavut, Canada--which has less than 40,000 people in an area larger than Alaska--FB is the main way people stay in contact. No word on how many of their FB accounts are actually polar bears looking for empty houses.