Hating on 'Like Farms': boffins trawl for Facebook fakes An analysis of 1,400 Facebook accounts, more than 143,000 posts Liked, and more than a million pages could go some way to unmasking the techniques of “Like Farms” used to manipulate reputations on the content-with-ads network. The boffins, from Australia's (doomed) NICTA, University College, London, and the University of Iowa …
No, most net users are not native English speakers, and by that I mean US/UK/AU. On the other hand, Ich keine schreiben Deutsch, oh, forget it... Ich kann nicht in Deutsch zu schreiben, aber ich kann auf Englisch zu schreiben und verwenden Sie Google-zu übersetzen.
And that only took three tries using Google Translate and I am still not sure that the German means what I think. 20 years ago, I probably could have gotten by with my college German. Today...not so much. I didn't use it, other than trying to sing along with Ramstein, and I lost it.
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Why would you want to fix this problem?
Is the compulsive desire to overcome a problem simply because it's there so strong that even supposedly intelligent people spend their time trying to make facebook better? Or is El Reg inaccurately using the term "boffin" to describe undergrads?
It'd certainly be disappointing if a Reg article covering some research result didn't elicit at least one anti-intellectual whinge questioning its utility.
There's an arms race between "bot" automated and semi-automated manipulation of online reputation networks and similar resources (product reviews, etc), on one side, and detection of such manipulation on the other. It involves a number of interesting issues in information security, natural-language processing, and weak AI, not to mention higher-level disciplines like rhetoric and lower-level implementation details such as graph theory. So there are ample grounds for useful primary research.
Widely-used reputation networks like Facebook have economic consequences, regardless of whether you personally find them interesting. So there's motivation for applied research as well.
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