Facebook, Abuse, and Metadata
Last year, I wondered if Facebook was going to use metadata to detect possible misbehavior online. We now know that the answer is yes. Read the full article for details, but briefly, they’re using (of course) machine learning and features like message time, communication patterns compared with the social graph, etc. To give just one example, they can look for “an adult sending messages or friend requests to a large number of minors” as a possible sign of a pedophile.
Some of the effort is education: “Our new safety notices also help educate people on ways to spot scams or imposters and help them take action to prevent a costly interaction.” I have grave doubts that that will work well, but we’ll see.
The hard part is going to be knowing how well it works. How will they know about false positives, situations where they flag a communication as suspect but it really isn’t? For that matter, how will they know about true positives? I can think of possible answers, but I’ll wait for further details.
