Mr. Schultz added that Facebook was cautious in removing manually created accounts because it didn’t want to erase authentic profiles. “We don’t want to over-enforce,” he said. “So what we actually focus on is the harmful behavior.”
Yet obvious fake accounts that are engaging in harmful behavior slip through. Last year, I found dozens of fake accounts masquerading as the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, to scam Facebook users out of cash. Some had been up for years.
Facebook also said the vast majority of fake accounts it removed were ones that it had spotted, rather than ones that users had reported. Of the 2.8 billion fake accounts it took down in the year that ended Sept. 30, Facebook said, it found 99.3 percent on its own.
Those numbers also contradict my experience. Last year, I easily created 11 Facebook accounts that used the same name, occupation and profile photo as my verified account. They remained live for five days, until I reported them to Facebook. Instagram, which Facebook owns, also left up 10 impostor accounts I had created until I reported them; it took down only five, until I alerted a Facebook spokesman.
If an account appears to be impersonating another user but isn’t “engaged in harmful behavior,” Facebook often leaves it up, Mr. Schultz said. He said such duplicate accounts could be from people who had lost their password or were confused.
Duplicate accounts add to confusion
Duplicate accounts are banned under Facebook’s rules. But they persist anyway, in even greater numbers than fake accounts, according to the company’s estimates, compounding its problem of inauthentic activity.
Facebook’s estimates of duplicates have also seesawed, including nearly doubling in 2017. Take a look at the chart below.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/technology/facebook-fake-accounts.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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