‘With great power comes great responsibility’ is a famous quote from Spiderman and it holds true not just for the super hero but also for leaders, politicians and in our case, huge businesses. Arguably the biggest social media platform today, Facebook understands that in order for things to be good on their side, there’s usually a lot of homework to be done.
Earlier this year, Facebook had revealed that more than 4.8% of its accounts are either ‘duplicate (fake) accounts or are being used for nefarious purposes that violate Facebook’s rules.’ These fake accounts are also sometimes responsible for spreading SPAM content amongst other users and generating fake likes. This doesn’t give a very good picture overall and it seems Facebook is taking serious steps to tackle this menace.
In an interview with Business Insider, Carolyn Everson, Vice-President, Global Marketing Solutions – Facebook, lays down the efforts taken by the social media giant to kill fake accounts and prevent it from hampering its social reputation. The interview can be seen below:
BI: What is the situation with the fake users and duplicate accounts rate? I know you were working on that certainly in the first part of the year, but you didn’t update it in Q3. Is that under control now?
CE: It is very much under control now. It’s something we monitor vigilantly. We have user operations teams based in India, in Dublin, in California and Austin that are constantly monitoring. We want to ensure that one of the core tenets of Facebook is that you have your unique identity on Facebook.
BI: Where are these people coming from? I don’t understand what the point of it is.
CE: There were certain pockets of the world where this was more prevalent in some of the emerging markets, which by the way, is not dissimilar to what happened with search when search first launched. There were a lot of fake clicks happening. It is something the industry at large deals with. This isn’t a FB-specific issue. If anything, we have an advantage because we are a true identity platform so we can quickly figure out if anyone is their true self on Facebook.
BI: Does that mean, though, that you will be deleting, for instance, the Facebook page that might apparently be run by my dog?
CE: We have not specifically gone to target people who have started pages for their dogs. What we are looking for is people who have widespread fake user ID accounts to make sure we take them out of the system. We call them bad actors and that’s how we identify them.
That’s one great and effective strategy for monitoring user accounts.
