> .. FB are not incentivized enough to remove fake accounts
What makes you think Facebook isn't prioritizing this? I'm not questioning whether you're right about this, just curious about what made you draw this conclusion.
Someone I am intimate with left Facebook in the last month, in anger at the way senior management up to and including MZ first dismissed the severity of the problem of their platform being used to push propaganda during the election cycle.
And then stonewalled and foot dragged efforts to correct this. By the account I got the only incentive for action has been unflattering attention at the national press level.
This from someone with a personal relationship with Z.
> Someone I am intimate with left Facebook in the last month, in anger at the way senior management up to and including MZ first dismissed the severity of the problem of their platform being used to push propaganda during the election cycle.
Intelligent and reasonable people can disagree - strongly as to the extent of how much of a problem this is, whether or not it is a problem, or whether the cure is worse then the disease.
This also has little to do with fake user accounts.
Honestly, once you become that rich and powerful, I can imagine it's pretty difficult to not live inside a bubble. They probably don't understand how serious some problems are because they're not normal users. Also, it's probably hard to not let it go to your head and think that you always know what's best for the common rabble.
I haven't seen a claim that fake users played a large role in spreading propaganda or fake news. As far as I understand it the issue lies in what people were sharing and what Facebook identifies as trending news.
That's a pretty different issue from Twitters fake accounts.
I've seen stuff debunked by Snopes ECT so I link to Snopes to show my friend that what they shared was fake news, only to see him share the same link next week. He claimed he did not read the article but it agreed with his political views so it must be true.
I've seen fake Twitter tweets as well that have bad spelling and other stuff in them that it is obviously a fake tweet made by some website fake tweet generators out there. Then shared on Facebook as an uploaded image. If they don't link to the original tweet on Twitter consider it a fake tweet.
Your criterion for determining a fake tweet doesn't work if someone regularly tweets things and then deletes them. The combination of this behavior and abundant fake tweets allows people who like and who loathe a particular person on Twitter to build up opposing views of what is real.
"So how many of them are real and how many of them are fake accounts?"
"We work very hard to make sure Facebook is free of fake accounts."
"That's not the answer to my question.".