USA TODAY asks FBI to probe rise in fake Facebook followers
USA TODAY asks FBI to probe rise in fake Facebook
followers
Elizabeth Weise and Brad Heath , USA TODAY Published 7:54
p.m. ET May 5, 2017 | Updated 2 hours ago
The parent company of USA TODAY says it has asked the FBI
to investigate a wave of fake Facebook accounts. USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO – The parent company of USA TODAY said it
had asked the FBI to investigate a wave of fake Facebook accounts so large it
accounted for half of the newspaper’s following on the social media platform.
Facebook purged millions of those fake accounts from USA
TODAY and other publishers three weeks ago, the latest salvo in the social
giant’s battle against scammers and spammers seeking access to its platform and
its 1.94 billion users.
Those axed accounts included more than a third of USA
TODAY’s approximately 15.2 million Facebook "likes" at the time.
Executives of Gannett Co., parent of USA TODAY and 109 local news properties,
said Thursday millions of its remaining followers also were fake, and it
continued to accumulate a thousand phony followers a day.
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.
The continued presence of phony accounts hasn't checked
the social network's user growth, but they can cause confusion and havoc for
individual users and companies. Fake profiles that masquerade as real people
have also caused tragedy, such as the torture and killing of a university
student in Pakistan after someone set up a fake Facebook account in his name
that allegedly contained blasphemous content.
In USA TODAY's case, it's not clear why spam operators
have targeted the media company's Facebook pages in droves.
"We don’t know why the scope of impact on USA
Today’s Facebook Page appears greater than any other publisher," said
Shaik.
Facebook suggested three weeks ago that a "major
spam operation" had set up the accounts as a way to access and potentially
spam and scam its users. These fake accounts follow and comment on publishers’
pages to lend a veneer of credibility that might help the account operators
connect with real users while veiling them from Facebook's automatic fake
account detectors.
USA TODAY appears to have been the main target of this
operation. Gannett contacted the FBI late Wednesday because the barrage was
“not stopping,” and the company is no closer to identifying its source, said
Maribel Wadsworth, the publisher’s chief transformation officer. The FBI
declined to comment.
While creating fake accounts violates Facebook's terms of
service, it probably isn't a crime. But a proliferation of such accounts risks
damaging a publisher's brand at a time when the social network is one of the
key ways news organizations reach their readers.
When Facebook purged the fake accounts in April, it cut
200 million fake likes from the pages of major publishers, including 20,000
from the U.K.'s Guardian. Some 12 million were from USA TODAY and affiliates,
the single largest group, Wadsworth said. The discovery comes after Gannett had
touted the extent of its reach on the social platform, including in a Feb. 22
report to its shareholders. Gannett said it has not seen a drop in Facebook
referrals to its own properties since Facebook said it was tackling the spam
operation.
Wadsworth said Gannett has taken steps to prevent its
Facebook pages from attracting more fake followers, including blocking new
followers from Bangladesh, one of the countries the company thinks is the
source of a significant proportion of the spam accounts.
One batch of fake accounts featured posters who appeared
to be in countries such as Bangladesh, India, Egypt and Pakistan, often with
comments written in Bengali, Hindi, Urdu and Arabic. These appear to be manually
created accounts, as opposed to accounts created by software, suggesting
somewhere in the world humans are busy setting up these profiles.
These are made to look more realistic by adding likes and
friends, though their comments can look like spam and are often just copied
text from random sources. The spam operation Facebook tried to purge in
mid-April appeared to come from accounts located in Bangladesh, Indonesia,
Saudi Arabia, and other countries, the social network said at the time. The
company said it had been targeting that operation for six months.
“We saw one of these accounts post gibberish, it was
literally just “13459u2 34ltijsre” and then it had 4,000 “likes” because there
were 4,000 fake accounts and they were all liking each other,” said Dan Nadir,
vice president for digital risk at Proofpoint, a security company that provides
social media protection and compliance for USA TODAY.
Another batch of fake accounts featured a female name
that would be common in the United States and with a photo of an attractive
young woman.
“They’re always students, they’re always single and they
tend to say they work for popular sports teams. We’ve seen thousands of them
that say they work for the New York Yankees,” said Nadir.
Almost immediately after they are created, the profile
holder goes to the USA TODAY page on Facebook and follows it. Users who visit
USA TODAY's Facebook page actually won’t see many of these accounts because
they’re the easiest to spot and the ones Proofpoint's software can immediately
delete, said Nadir.
'Numbers game'
In one way or another, fake Facebook accounts are usually
designed to make money. Operators of a scam can use the fake followers to send
links to malware or to sell questionable weight loss products or send messages
asking for money from someone who claims to be a friend stranded in a foreign
country who’s lost their password, said Dennis Yu, chief technology officer
with BlitzMetrics.
The true money-making opportunity is getting a real
Facebook user to “friend” one of the fake accounts. The average Facebook user
has 350 to 400 friends. So even if only one real person accepts the fake
account's friend request, it can then attempt to spam all their friends, said
Yu.
"It's a numbers game. These fake accounts are cheap
to create and if they can get just one person to click on the link they can
make enough to cover the cost," he said.
Wadsworth said there was no indication of a security risk
to legitimate followers of USA TODAY's Facebook page.
Media company pages are especially enticing to the
spammers because they post articles frequently, giving the fake accounts many
opportunities to “like” the posts and therefore seem more like real accounts.
The April purge of fake accounts reduced USA TODAY’s
Facebook likes by 6 million, from 15.2 million to 9.5 million as of Thursday
night. Wadsworth said Facebook told Gannett it planned to purge another 3
million accounts soon, which could reduce overall followers to as low as 6.5
million.
Merely creating accounts – even a lot of them – that
violate Facebook’s terms probably wouldn’t be a crime, said Orin Kerr, a George
Washington University law professor and director of the school’s Cybersecurity
Law Initiative. “Beyond that, it would depend on what they did with the fake
accounts.”
Facebook said in mid-April it didn't appear the spam
operation had been activated yet. It didn't involve any paid ads. Still,
Gannett had halted marketing efforts meant to attract new readers until it gets
the issue under control, Wadsworth said. She said an internal investigation had
found no evidence that Gannett or its marketing campaigns had deliberately
attracted fake accounts.
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