USA TODAY asks FBI to probe rise in fake Facebook followers

We at ACC are interested to see where this goes. We have “partnered” with Facebook on some things and in most respects the company has been good to work with. But this inquiry could be important.

(From USA Today)

Facebook on Friday said it’s detected additional suspicious activity since its April fake-account crackdown, some of which look similar to the campaign it disrupted in April. Others more closely resemble common fake profiles that post spam comments and attempt to look legitimate by engaging with businesses’ Facebook pages.

“After we identified the additional set of violating accounts, we notified our partners at USA Today, and are taking action against these accounts,” said  Shabnam Shaik, technical program manager on Facebook’s protect and care team, in a statement. She declined to reveal how many fake accounts Facebook had discovered.

Facebook has said in filings with the Securities and Exchange commission that it estimates about 1% of its monthly worldwide active users are “misclassified” accounts, which it says includes both fake accounts and those that don’t abide by its terms of service, such as people creating accounts for their pets. The company believes the majority of these are outside of the United States. The company declined to say what the ratio between these types of misclassified accounts was.

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