Nawaz: Who do those Facebook algorithms think I am?

Article content

A few years ago, I started receiving follow-up requests on my blocked Instagram account from a group of young bikini-clad women. How dumb do these scammers think I am? I was wondering. I removed all requests from the bathing beauties and eventually the algorithm that had caught my eye disappeared.

Article content

Then last year, I started getting strange friend requests on Facebook from single, muscular men in Kentucky and Tennessee, usually ex-military men, who, if you were to believe their photos, spent their weekends hunting, lifting weights, and going to town. church. The profiles were generally new, with 10 or fewer connections, and names that seemed a bit out of place or misspelled, such as Mickel Harisson or Romeo Beurt. Aha, I thought. At the very least, the scammers’ fishing net isn’t exclusively laden with the stolen photos of attractive young women. Finally, equal opportunities in the world of bots.

But then I started to get outraged. Who did these robots think I was? It’s like the algorithms don’t know me at all. Given all the time that I spend on the internet, I felt a bit insulted. Sure, I’m happily married and I’m not about to fall for a scammer, but why did all of my fake Bible belt steak muffins seem to have voted for Tr * mp?

Article content

It reminded me of when I decided to allow targeted ads on Facebook. Tired of the most overwhelming types of clickbait, I decided to let the cookies track my every move and show me ads for cute earrings or retro dresses instead of slideshows of now unrecognizable celebrities or that amazing secret to shedding belly fat. … which, having never clicked, I still assume it’s just a mail order tapeworm.

I felt the same urge with these generic haircuts. At least give me a semi-plausible fake suitor: an intellectual, preferably with horn-rimmed glasses, perched in front of a wall of books. Or a singer-songwriter with unruly hair and eyes full of feeling, playing the guitar. Or Aragorn.

Still, the counterfeiters remained Southern weightlifters who enjoyed polishing their weapons in their spare time, and I wasn’t impressed.

Article content

Apparently millions, yes, millions, of fake accounts are created and blocked by Facebook every day, both by tens of thousands of real Facebook employees, and by an advanced machine learning system called Deep Entity Classification, trained in the many indicators. signs of counterfeits controlled by robots. Billions of accounts are deactivated each year, but problems persist as hand-manipulated counterfeits are harder to detect and often slip off the net.

On its help pages, Facebook identifies the most common types of scams to avoid: access token theft (in which a third party tries to take control of your account), lottery scams, loan scams, job scams and romantic scams. In most cases, these scammers are looking for personal information or money.

Article content

Romance is where my potential southern suitors come in. If I accepted their requests, they would likely engage in conversations where the end goal could be sextortion (teasing, recording, and then threatening to post a compromising video if payment is not made) or a request for funds for a flight or visa.

Recently, I’ve been added by people with French profiles who almost seemed to live in Montreal, aside from their unusual nicknames, names like, for example, Hamartek Labroni or Genine Barduk, who sounded like futuristic characters out of Dune. o Foundation. But when I clicked, I was surprised to see that these profiles had significant activity and tons of friends, ranging from several hundred to a few thousand. Many even had a mutual friend with me, although I soon realized that it was the same mutual friend, who might as well have been hacked.

Article content

As artificial intelligence improves in the elimination of counterfeits, counterfeits also improve. And bad actors can also employ machine learning to improve the quality of their fake profiles with more realistic names and biographies.

When I started turning down applications, thinking I had mixed up some real ones by accident, I reconsidered my earlier stance on Kentucky fakes. It’s better if scammers are easier to spot and the internet doesn’t know me like that. I’m sure you already know enough.

This week, Facebook will apparently announce a name change to reflect its ambition to expand into what Zuckerberg has called the “metaverse,” and probably also to focus attention away from a lot of recent bad press. Most likely, the rebrand refers to the parent company in general and Facebook will continue to exist under their umbrella, but I’ve started calling it “Fakebook” anyway. It is the most credible name I have heard so far.