Facebook quietly admits to a big percentage of fake accounts
Facebook currently released its quarterly record earnings and also announced that they will add another 10,000 employees to invest in security of the website. The reason to the security may be due to the fake news and allegations of Russian propaganda that has been spreading over the platform. After the announcement of increasing security and a lot of extra big spending the company has planned, lead to the value of Facebook's shares dropping 2% shortly after it went up from the Q3 earnings report.
Over 10% of Facebook's 2.07 billion monthly users are estimated to be duplicate
the estimates before this were to only be around 6%. This is quite a big number considering Facebook has a very strict signup and identity verification process where as on sites like Twitter or Twitch all you need is just an email to create an account.
Some are created due to user mistakes but many for spamming and shady networking bots. These bots are often created to fake interaction between Facebook pages.
Source 1 Source 2
While many here on Steemit like to complain about the slow sign up process, I myself am glad that new registrations are carefully considered from being from fake users or emails. Back in the beginning of Steem it was a lot easier to create accounts and obviously the abuse was much higher of fake or clone accounts. I believe its a good decision to early on try and fight these, we've already experienced some form of spam either in comments or voting/following and if there were no borders this could get out of hand quickly.
As I said there are some companies that don't care about the signup process at all as long as the numbers look pleasing to their shareholders, this is a much better method to make sure the growth and activity are as real and natural as possible and it will make for a much healthier platform in the long run.
What are your thoughts on the current signup process and bot networks?
In case you were not aware of, there is now a tool to make it easier to sign up your friends through a low Steem fee and delegation called Steeminvite created by @pharesim.
Bots and Fake-Accounts are a problem to be solved – that's for sure!
But there still is a problem about human infiltration as well, which should be on the future-agenda of steemit also...
A 2 year scheduled social-media-analysis of Munic University of Politics just released its findings today. Not Suprisingly they showed that US-polling-strategists are able to influence the public image of the candidates very well.
See the research in german language here:
http://politicaldatascience.blogspot.pt/p/somefo.html?view=classic
Additionally they found out that in Germany for example the right-wing-populisits are those parties who are most likely to take over the public discourse on social media.
In the same manner data-analysis of twitter detected that some accounts of these nationalist groups are blogging at office opening times only, what reveals them as proffessional politic-influencers.
Find more about this research-project here:
http://digitalpresent.tagesspiegel.de/afd
If Steemit is going to grow further this challenges need to be answered, I think...
Thanks @acidyo for starting this urgent discussion!
@acidyo I am grateful that I do not waste my time on Fakebook anymore. STEEMIT is the place to be and Earn for your Content and Commentary.
I am glad I never got accustomed to being on Facebook and interacting that.
Hence no addiction to break.
Steemit, on the other hand....yes I am addicted.
@taskmaster4450 I am Grateful for you taking the time to reply to my Comment. Interaction with other STEEMIANS is what makes STEEMIT such a Fantastic Place to be.
Thank you @stckjockey
I feel there is not enough commenting on here....too many people read and do not leave a comment that leads to interaction. We all like getting the "nice post" but there isnt much to go on there.
Seldom log in to my Facebook account since I joined Steemit, and there are just so many conspiracies going behind Facebook.
me too broo.
It is a double-edged sword.
People who come over and sign up for steemit usually do so with their peak excitement. When it takes anywhere for a day to a week to get the confirmation, often people forgot about it.
That said, I agree with the process overall. Fake numbers to satisfy Wall Street is something different than we are doing on Steemit. We could care less what Wall Street thinks. I would prefer to have more involved membership base with less overall users.
@taskmaster4450 I second that. We don't care about the current CORRUPT System, we are trying to remove ourselves from that system.
You are 1000% correct. Those who are on here are early adopters of what is becoming the new model that will spread across the Internet. Call it Internet 3.0 or whatever you want, the fact is that tokens are the future and the centralized entities which control the platform is going to end up like the rotary phone.
Steem is just one of the many blockchains which will create an enormous amount of change in the lives of average people. I am starting to buy into the idea that STEEM will ultimately be $1,000 apiece. With all we are seeing at the early stages, it is common sense to believe that things can explode. This blockchain has some great things being developed on them.
We just need to attract people to these apps.
Ofcourse they have many fake accounts. Those are many to marketing and spreading spam messages.
I do agree on signup process to be strict, but it is strict across the board? Singing up through the Steemit website is stirct. But what about using Anonsteem or this new service Steeminvite you? I never used those, so I don't know what process of identification they us.
Then again, when having fake accounts, is not that much of an issue. Service value is not so (or at least shall not so) much be related to the number of accounts, but to the usage of the service, eg active users per day/week/month, active accounts per day/week/month.
Many social media accounts have fake profiles. Fake accounts have been a problem to many social media platforms.
Twitter is one of them with the highest account of bots. Anyway, with special attention to account profiles, they can fish out these fake people.
Not a big deal...FB is short of junkyard. I am not using FB for the last couple of years. I hardly logged in there for few min for some personal info.
No matter what people always like your post even you posted of some sad info .....Grreat waste of time.
It is very obvious of the duplicate or fake account on FB mate! If i take myself for example, since I joined FB 10 years back, i have in all created 4 accounts as the ones before! I wonder how many like me are there on FB!
I am so happy to have found steemit and the long process here is ok as it help in minimizing fake accounts!
Dang! thats such a high number, I didn't realize. I like how Steemit is taking the extra step to limit fake accounts.