I think in Facebook's case it has more to do with having highly detailed information about their users, which fakes go against. Anyway, a lot of fake accounts get deleted quickly, as mentioned in the article (and I've observed this myself, as obviously fake profiles I've gotten friend requests from usually end up deleted in a day or two).
And a lot of other fake accounts don't get deleted. FB doens't really care about the detailed information about their users, as long as they advertisers keep sending them money. Don't mix up what FB says they want, and what they actually want.
OK, but if the information is obviously bogus will advertisers keep paying? I don't think deleting fake accounts is necessarily an easy problem. Particularly when we consider that a false positive is much worse than a false negative as far as user impact goes.
> OK, but if the information is obviously bogus will advertisers keep paying?
Apparently yes. It's no secret that FB's numbers are not accurate, but they are still making a ton of money.
> I don't think deleting fake accounts is necessarily an easy problem. Particularly when we consider that a false positive is much worse than a false negative as far as user impact goes.
Nobody said it was easy. Only that FB is incentivised to do detection poorly. FB doesn't really care about user impact, they only care about profit. If it's not enough user impact to cause a dent in profit, they aren't incentivised to care.
> Nobody said it was easy. Only that FB is incentivised to do detection poorly. FB doesn't really care about user impact, they only care about profit. If it's not enough user impact to cause a dent in profit, they aren't incentivised to care.
I think you've misunderstood my point (or perhaps glossed over it). From a UX perspective, it's way, way worse to delete a real person's account and tell them they're fake (tons of negative news coverage every time these screw-ups happen) than it is to let a fake account slide. So any technique that errs on the side of being too aggressive they are unlikely to use.
