Facebook – Russian Company Generates Fake Accounts, Buys Political Ads
Have you ever created a fake account to play a joke on a friend? Or perhaps to have renewed access to someone’s information who has recently blocked you? These are just a few examples of the countless reasons to generate fake social media accounts, and while these isolated instances can be viewed as relatively harmless on their own, fake accounts running rampant across the internet pose a serious issue.
Forbes staffer Kathleen Chaykowksi writes about the recent discovery of hundreds of fake Facebook accounts maintained by a Russian company that were used to purchase $100,000 worth of political ads. The Russian company, Internet Research Agency, is known for using fake accounts to comment on news articles and post on social media sites. The 3,000 ads that were purchased focused on subjects such as LGBTQ and gun rights, and while it remains unclear if these ads were coordinated with Russian government attempts to interfere with the Presidential Election, the takeaway is clear: fake social media accounts have tremendous power. We must now ask ourselves, what can be done to prevent this in the future?
Facebook’s recent fiasco directly connects to our study of social media networks, specifically in the identification of fake accounts, or nodes, in the network. At a simple level, we identified fake accounts using the criteria that a fake account doesn’t have friends that are friends with one another (a seemingly random set of friends). Of course, in the real world, fake account detection is more complicated. The takeaway here is that more resources should be invested in writing faster and more accurate fake account detection algorithms by the major social media companies. This would cut back on the rapid uncontrollable spreading of misinformation, leading to a more accurately informed society.