You could be a victim of one of the Facebook's biggest drawbacks. Of course, data privacy and security are number one. The second drawback originates from how Facebook makes its advertisements or rather how it distributes the posts that are promoted by its users. Facebook likes and the distribution of its content has been a headache to both the users and the developers at Facebook.
Fake accounts. Fakes accounts are diluting the credibility of Facebook pages and promotion of posts. Fake accounts are being used to promote content, trick the news feed algorithm and spread fake news.
When Facebook was started, it used to get its validations from the colleges’ admins. This means that one could only become a member or user of a Facebook after becoming a student in a university or college. This move made the number of fake accounts significantly low.
After Facebook was opened to the world. Everything broke loose. People started making pseudo accounts. Some used it to catfish others, some forgot their passwords and could not bother resetting them and some just did it for experimentation. With time, a group of people started capitalizing in making fake accounts.
Fake accounts spiked gradually after the value of Facebook's like button went high. Initially introduced on the 9th of February 2009, the button enabled users to interact with others by liking posts and advertisements. On April 21, 2010 the like button was officially unveiled as a plugin for websites. The button boosted the quality of traffic between other websites especially blogs and Facebook. Facebook could now collect data on user interaction on and off Facebook.
Suddenly, people realized that the best metric in measuring the distribution of a content was the number of likes one got. Some started cheating the system to gain control and might in Facebook by making numerous Facebook accounts. Since this was tedious and cumbersome to humans, this task was given to click farms.
Click farms employ people who have thousands of accounts of accounts purposely created to generate, direct and engage in posts at a fee. Reports by the guardian show that these people earn very little money to make such actions but regular people can buy these services online though websites that promise as much as 10,000 likes within 3 days.
Towards the end of 2013, Facebook got a lot of backlash on the ideas of click farms running the platform. Facebook response by adding artificial intelligence to eliminate accounts that were suspected to be controlled by the click farms.
The AI mostly check the number of pages that are liked by the two or more accounts, the Geo-location of the users, the engagements recorded by those accounts and other metrics.
To combat this, there has been a rise in accounts that are created and maintained by bots. These bots are designed to counter all the actions taken by Facebook in its war against fake accounts. With increase in understanding, artificial intelligence, these bots are becoming clever every day and becoming indistinguishable from real accounts. Facebook has openly admitted to deleting 1.2 billion fake accounts in the last three months of 2018 and 2.19 billion in the first quarter of 2019. Though Facebook claims to have control, it is estimated that the number of fake accounts which are mainly created by bots could be close to 3 billion.
As a measure, Facebook is looking into ways to eliminate financial incentives of fake accounts for commercial purposes. Mark Zuckerberg claims that Facebook is in control of the situation and Facebook has made a special team to combat fake accounts. It claims to have deleted accounts that had AI generated content but people are seeing crack in these claims.
On the other hand, the future doesn’t seem to be clear for Facebook, especially with great developments in deep fakes and a notable increase in the number of A.I generated content that is indistinguishable from real content.
