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Comment by fsttx | Hacker News Reader

There's an angle that hasn't been explored that ought to be: a lot of news and political commentary websites used to run their own comment systems for articles or use pseudonymous services like Disqus, but these were overrun by "trolls" and spammers.

Many then switched to Facebook, presumably hoping that the "Real Name" policy would improve things.

The interesting thing is that clicking on many of the Facebook profiles on these comments leads to curiously sterile profiles, with a few friends. Some of the most vehemently pro-Trump comments seem to have originated from these accounts, especially on certain Conservative sites during the Republican Primary season.

Facebook seems to have no interest (or ability) to clean this up.

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I don't doubt that many of the commenters praising Trump, or any other politician for that matter, may in fact be sockpuppet accounts, but I wonder if this might be a similar situation to what we saw with polling prior to the election in which Trump voters were less willing to admit to voting for him. I'm not actually sure if this was the case but I've heard it theorized that this is one of the reasons polling might have been so off.

Perhaps there are commenters unwilling to link their real FB identity to supporting Trump? On the other hand, I see plenty of people make outrageous statements online clearly linked to their real FB profile so maybe this isn't a widespread concern.

I mentioned that this happened on Conservative sites, and it was during the Primaries. It seems unlikely that, under those circumstances, people would be so shy about expressing their preferences.

Also these are not just stand-alone fake accounts with no friends created for making comments....these are curated to have enough details that make them look plausible to an unsophisticated automated detector (or overworked FB abuse department employee), but they have few friends, all with similar sorts of profiles, and no signs of activity except for posting comments.

I do agree that there was an element of "shyness" and self-censorship, but I expect it was from supporters of other candidates, who would not want their Real Names and identities to get embroiled in fights with fake profiles.

Good points, although I didn't mean to dispute that these were mostly fake accounts meant to push an agenda.

As a side note, I don't have a FB account so I don't know how this works but do your friends have the ability to see what comments you've made on sites using FB login for commenting?

Yes but I believe you can hide this.

I've seen enough people doxxed in various capacities that there are good reasons for this in general. You won't find anything on mine... if I even have one. I've been avoiding Facebook since the days it required a .edu email to sign up, for example.

That said, I'm sure that all the politicians have people who can drum up social media followers or spread whatever message they want. I don't think there's any conspiracy to it. It's not like we've gotten rid of email spam, either. This is just an extension of that.

While I wouldn't dismiss the chance that some of these people are fakes I would like to point out that despite being a techie (if not because of it?) I barely use Facebook anymore and if I hadn't been registered for a long time my Facebook profile would also be pretty barren. I also always had a policy of only "friending" people I know personally and privately. The only purpose of Facebook for me is keeping up with those friends and I rarely post anything and rarely do it publicly. I doubt I'm the only one using Facebook this way.

My Facebook account is so barren that it has never existed, but if I'm ever forced to create an account to deal with websites that assume everyone has a FB acct and can't deal with you otherwise, it will be as sterile as I can make it.

And my Twitter account is so sterile that no one I know follows me. And yet, it's a real account.

The thing is, do you have only 5-10 FB Friends with eerily similar sterile accounts in a little-self contained social graph? Have you added a college to your profile, but have no Friends from that college?

I've got a fake FB account for the same reason you describe, and I don't bother go to the efffort of puttiing in the sorts of fake details that these accounts have.

I'd like to see that for myself. Can you find any examples now?

Look for [redacted]. It's an obvious fake, but you can go down the rabbit hole from there.

*I hope you got the name. I've redacted it for obvious reasons.

There's also privacy settings - unless Facebook have wiped all my settings since I last checked (they used to do this lots but don't seem to any more) you're not going to see basically anything without adding me. That's probably distinguishable from a fake if you look closely, but similar enough that those accounts might look the same if you're just taking a quick look at each account.

All that machine learning stuff is pretty much useless against human generated fake profiles, just like captcha is useless against human captcha solvers.

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