Detecting Fake Facebook Accounts
Link: http://www.sogotechnews.com/2017/04/14/facebook-is-now-better-at-detecting-fake-accounts/
This article from Sogo Technews discusses one of Facebook’s more recent technologies; detecting fake accounts created to spread false information. The goal of this is for Facebook to limit the spread of fake news, as well as making it more difficult for businesses to buy likes. Businesses could higher people from developing nations, often referred to as turkers, that are paid to create accounts and do a task for a business (for example, boosting likes on a company page on Facebook). The issue with this is that the more likes a page has, the higher it is ranked in Facebook’s algorithm to suggest and display popular pages.
One of the interesting things about Facebook’s fake account detection, is that Facebook can figure out which accounts are fake without looking at the actual content of the posts from the alleged fake account. Facebook’s algorithm detects if the account is posting the same thing over and over again, or if there is a large spike in messaging activity. If a user suddenly starts messaging hundreds of people a day, it is likely that is a fake account.
This article is relevant to the material being presented in class because it relates to social networks and graph theory. Even in the first homework we saw an example of a spam email account. Facebook’s algorithm, albeit more complex, also looks at an account’s interaction with other accounts. From a high level view, the algorithm most likely does several things that we learned in class already. It identifies groups of friends (clusters) and examines the frequency of messages sent. If one person is spamming messages a lot, or if the account had a spike in unusual activity, it would then be flagged as a fake or hacked account. The algorithm may even look at strong vs weak ties (although it would probably quantify the ties instead of just using strong and weak).
Overall, I think this is a great step forward for Facebook, and an interesting application of social networks presented in class. It shows how the concepts we are learning can be applied in the real world, they just need more technical detail and refining.