I was surprised to find that I could access my Facebook advertising preferences again, after the section stopped working in January 2019. What was there was still way off, in June 2021, but it’s nice to be able to edit (read delete) them again after two-and-a-half years. Things move slowly in Menlo Park when it comes to user privacy. Frankly, they shouldn’t even be collecting preferences after you’ve opted out of preference-targeting—not even Google is stupid enough to do that (possibly as they have other nefarious means).
I was chatting to one friend who is as principled as me when it comes to Facebook bots. She screen-grabbed one who tried to send her a friend request, and we got chatting about the thousands-strong bot nets I’ve encountered.
She noted there was some fan fiction connected to one of the surnames, and I was able to find the Filipino TV series Halik. So are these accounts, accused by me of being bots, simply role-playing ones?
The reason I even know about them is that they attempt to join a group I oversee, usually with bot software that incorrectly answered the questions we had put up to weed out the fake accounts. (As I noted recently, Facebook has got rid of these, allowing bots to come in to every public group.) Why do they do this? They come in, hoping to hide among groups (and they also become page fans), to make themselves look legitimate. What happens instead is that we report them, and watch as Facebook does nothing about them, telling us that these automated scripts are allowed, and never mind the damage they do to pages wanting to reach their members. You’ll just have to pay more and more and more to boost the posts to reach the people you once reached for free.
Secondly, it’s concerning that accounts marked as newly started ones on Facebook already have hundreds, if not thousands, of friends within days. These just aren’t normal patterns. They also talk to each other like nonsensical bots, responding with the same emojis or words.
On both these counts, the fact the accounts have names from a Pinoy TV series has little bearing. Facebook doesn’t care either way.
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