Speaking as an ex-Facebook growth employee, fake accounts actually hurt growth and are actively sought out and removed by a dedicated team. Think about it--if a user receives a bunch of fake friend requests, it's a bad experience. This is one of the (many) reasons MySpace died--because of the onslaught of porn-promoting accounts that they never cleaned up until it was too late.
Facebook certainly has been more diligent about stomping out fake accounts than most other services, with Twitter being social media's problem child.
A telling anecdote: A security researcher friend of mine found a somewhat small botnet of twitter accounts (~7000). Reported it to twitter, a few months passed and he noticed twitter hadn't done anything. So he turned it over to a journalist who eventually poked someone at twitter and... poof all 7000+ accounts were gone 6 hours later.
I set up a fake Facebook profile a long time ago as a prank, added everyone at my college as friends, and people I know still say they get notifications about his birthday. And people still reach out to wish him a happy birthday.
I have no idea what credentials I used to create it so I can't delete it, but it still exists (unlike the person it's pretending to be).
I think the signature of those kinds of fake accounts are different than most of the malicious accounts though.
You creating a fake college account and forgetting about it probably passes as human enough, there's no concerted effort or agenda to that account besides existing and adding friends at your college.
I think what makes bots and fake accounts generally detectable is consistently pushing certain messages in ways that exceed normal human behavior, as well as showing patterns across many fake accounts.
It's hard to see a pattern in one fake account, but easy to spot it across many.
Twitter is full of those porn promoting accounts. Typically this is an account with some female name and a profile pic of a person in a state of undress following lots of popular accounts.
Twitter doesn't even take them down if you complain about them. Very annoying.
Not just porn. My account with ~150 followers was, out of the blue and within a week, followed by a dozen different "startups". Every single one of them follows tens of thousands of people in the hopes of getting followed back. It's pathetic.
I'm not sure that's quite the same thing. That seems to be an example, at least somewhat, of using the platform as intended.
If your profile is public, and they decide to follow it, in part, to make you aware of their existence, perhaps that's a feature not a bug, given that the main use for the thing is to connect with accounts and follow them and discover content.
I see random accounts occasionally following me, and it's clear that they're just casting a very wide follow net to see who will follow back, presumably to get their readership up. To me, that's spam, no question about it. Even if it's targeted. (Targeted spam is still spam.)
I want people to follow me because they're interested in what I post, not because they're looking for me to follow them. Perhaps I'm asking too much of the platform, but... it is what it is.
I have had a Twitter account for I think close to a decade that I never use. I’ve never tweeted or followed anyone. Last time I logged in which was probably over 2 years ago, I had dozens of followers, all following nothing!
Yeah that’s probably accounts managed by some random shaddy tool that follows tons of people in the hope of getting follow-back then massively unfollow everyone.
> Think about it--if a user receives a bunch of fake friend requests, it's a bad experience.
Except that Facebook knows who is real and who fake. Just like my mail provider knows who sends spam and who doesn't.
Facebook can display ads to fake users and still make the campaigner pay for the impression, or make a group pay for reaching more users, fakes included.
Facebook can easily filter requests from fake profiles, so no, fake users do not necessary worsen the experience for real ones.
"Facebook can easily filter requests from fake profiles"
"Except that Facebook knows who is real and who fake."
You say that so definitively. Have you worked on a product with millions of new users a week? It's an extremely hard, constantly shifting problem.
"Facebook can display ads to fake users and still make the campaigner pay for the impression"
Facebook's entire business relies on user and advertise trust. Why would they sacrifice that for some short term growth that would inevitably kill the business by eroding trust?
While I don't pretend to have been party to internal FB conversations when certain decisions were made, as an advertiser, FB has definitely done some things to significantly erode that trust over the years.
For starters, encouraging advertisers to spend money to build up an audience with the assumption they could continue reaching that audience much like email, only to throttle organic reach to zero was pretty bad.
There have been other things such as being extremely...generous...with the definitions of how some ad metrics are defined and what defaults are presented. Even as an experienced advertiser who knows to look for those things, the lengths to which some of it it is buried is astounding to the point of it being hard to trust that it wasn't intentional. And the recent lawsuits around such things shows I'm not alone in that feeling.
> You say that so definitively. Have you worked on a product with millions of new users a week? It's an extremely hard, constantly shifting problem.
Facebook has hundreds of engineers and enough data to do match patterns against. Facebook can largely identify who's who.
> Facebook's entire business relies on user and advertise trust. Why would they sacrifice that for some short term growth that would inevitably kill the business by eroding trust?
"Facebook has hundreds of engineers and enough data to do match patterns against. Facebook can largely identify who's who." I know, I used to work there. I was asking you. Pattern matching isn't black-and-white, as you alluded to in your previous comment.
"Yes, the infamous 'they trust me, dumb fucks'?"
You didn't do or say stupid things when you were 19? You don't believe in giving second chances, let alone to a teenager?
Weirdly enough and probably unrelated, I had at least 4 fake friend request from “attractive” women in the last 2 weeks on FB. Mostly these accounts would disappear within hours or minutes. Never had that in x years of being on FB.
