Facebook Removes Accounts To Cleanse Network
Source: https://bgr.com/2019/10/21/facebook-fake-profiles-removed-iran-russia/
About a week ago, Facebook decided to increase their efforts to combat Russian and Iranian accounts created to spread disinformation. This past Monday, Facebook removed more than 100 Facebook accounts, 23 Facebook pages, and 20 Instagram accounts because of violation of Facebook’s terms of use, spreading false stories. Though in 2016, the big talk was with Russia interfering in our elections using social media, now the fake media is targeting different regions in the world – USA, North Africa, and Latin America. Facebook’s goal is to limit the spread of inaccurate news stories for the upcoming election cycle. In hopes to keeping the election as free and fair as possible, Facebook has started to look for networks of “coordinated inauthentic behavior”. Keeping our elections free and fair is the only way that we could claim the United States has a democracy. When people have fake information, it blurs reality and alters people’s true votes.
The Trump Presidency has changed how the president interacts with people, using social media, many people have also joined those platforms to keep up. Due to social media algorithms, some of these fake accounts become suggested when real users browse social media normally. As noted by Facebook, one account had over 13,000 real people that follow the account and over 60,000 people followed one of numerous Instagram accounts. With thousands of people following and many more just watching from the outside, this has become an obvious problem.
As seen in class by the 6 degrees of separation, Facebook really has 5 degrees. Having even a single follower “like” a post on a fake account, that post will then be filtered into suggested of the follower’s friends. This gives the fake account a large strongly connected component to a very large group of people and growing exponentially fast as the followers continue to like a share posts. This gives the fake accounts multiple bridges to many parts of the single large strongly connected cluster that is Facebook. The more followers the accounts get, the increases the PageRank score. But now as Facebook removes these accounts, their PageRank score gets reduced to 0. This is important as even a low PageRank score will gain a few bridges from outside hubs into the main cluster in Facebook, and then let the accounts build back up to what they were and keep spreading fake information.