https://techcrunch.com/2011/11/01/researchers-flood-facebook-with-bots-collect-250gb-of-user-data/
Researchers Flood Facebook With Bots, Collect 250GB Of User Data
This article addresses an experiment was conducted in UBC, where they searched online Facebook users and eventually created hundreds of fake Facebook accounts. Next, they sent friend requests to random people, with just 20% of success rate. However, once they are friends with some people, and they send friend request to those friends’ friends, the success rate rises to 60%. And Facebook is only able to detect 20 of the accounts. Each account made around 20 friends on average, but some made as many as 80 or 90. They get through Facebook’s fraud detection by rate limiting posts and friend requests. Considering that it is easy to mimic such creation of accounts and sending friend requests, this leads to question the effectiveness of Facebook’s authentication system.
This article is related to the class’s material because it mentioned triadic closure principle. We can observe in the article that if sending friend requests to random people, the chance of getting accepted as friends is 20%. However, if you are sending friends request to people who you have common friends with, the chance gets to 60%. In this article, this principle actually helps fake accounts to becomes friends with strangers on Facebook, and it increases the effectiveness that those fake accounts get friend requests accepted. Therefore it is very important to not to add friends that you totally don’t know and have no common friends with because they can be people who are faking accounts and want to manipulate the friend link on Facebook with you to do some potential harmful things to your friends. Also Facebook probably needs to update system to catch fraud action to detect fraud action to become friends with people by strategy that utilizes triadic closure principle.