Are you sure your friend on Facebook is real?

  

Fake Facebook accounts: a never-ending battle against bots

Facebook's crackdown on "inauthentic" activity has resulted in the blocking the staggering figure of more than three billion fake accounts over a 6 months period. According to Facebook, in the last 3 months of 2018, they disable 1.2 billion fake accounts, and 2.9 billion in the first 3 months of 2019. The amount of automated and bots account on social networking sites and social medias are increasing.

Creating Facebook 'bots' is a violation of its terms of service. Thus Facebook said its artificial intelligence detects most of these efforts and disables the accounts as soon as possible, preventing them from posting anything on their platform. However, as managing 'bots' and fake accounts are extremely tedious, Facebook acknowledges that around 5% of the more than two billion active Facebook accounts are probably fake.

Most fake social media accounts are 'bots' created by automated programs to post certain kinds of information as an effort to manipulate and influence social conversations and thoughts. Fake accounts may be used to amplify the popularity or dislike of a person or movement, thus distorting users' views of true public sentiment. 'Bots' have played a disproportionate role in spreading misinformation on social media ahead of the 2016 US election, according to researchers. Distrust and social division in many parts of the world, and in some cases even violence has occured due to misinformation. 

Although Facebook has been taking serious measures and efforts in combating fake accounts, new bots are becoming more and more sophisticated and are tougher to detect. It is definitely a never-ending battle in detecting and removing these harmful and misleading bots and fake accounts. 

As Facebook and other social networking sites are doing their best in removing such bots and fake accounts, as human, I feel that we should also do our part in being more cautious and wary of the information and sources on the internet, and not just blindly read and trust them even when the account seems legitimate with many other followers or groups. Also, we should take more responsibility in the things we share and repost on our social media accounts, to prevent more spread of misleading information.

sources:

(2019, May 24). Fake Facebook accounts: a never-ending battle against bots. Retrieved from https://www.france24.com/en/20190524-fake-facebook-accounts-never-ending-battle-against-bots