Facebook and the bad hombres of Texas, Queensland

Updated

Facebook wants to let you know that it's sorry. Sorry for abusing your personal data and sorry for allowing dodgy content, hate speech, lies and disinformation to be published and left to metastasise on its platform.

Key points: Hundreds of questionable Facebook accounts claim links to Texas, Queensland

Facebook profiles of US military personnel allegedly based in Syria claim to be from Texas, Queensland

An ABC News audit of 500 Facebook accounts revealed 448 contained suspicious signals

And as a measure of its commitment to fix the problem, Facebook wants to let everyone know that it has been cranking-up its crackdown on what it calls "inauthentic accounts", busting and deleting over a billion zombies, fakes, scammers, bots and trolls.

Despite the purge, the popular social network founded 14 years ago by Mark Zuckerberg admits there are between 66 and 88 million more undetected fakes among its 2.2 billion users.

Getting rid of them is still a work in progress, but critics say Facebook isn't looking hard enough or acting fast enough. Some even go as far to accuse Facebook of deliberately turning a blind eye to protect its business model.

Good folk, bad hombres

You don't need the benefit of Facebook's artificial intelligence detection system and its posse of thousands of human enforcers to trace some of those millions of fake accounts which have successfully evaded the dragnet.

They're there in plain sight. You just have to know where to look.

Take for instance, Texas, Queensland. Situated on the southern reaches of the Darling Downs 230km south-west of Brisbane, Texas sits on the banks of the Dumaresq River which forms the border with New South Wales.

While searching for Australians fighting in Syria, ABC News stumbled across scores of Facebook profiles of US military personnel allegedly based in Syria who all claimed to be from Texas, Queensland.

The trail led to hundreds more questionable Facebook accounts which claim links to that one small town which has a population of about 900.

From love scammers and get-rich-quick schemes to alt-right accounts spreading fake political news, the one thing in common with these accounts is that all the "people" behind them claim to live in or come from Texas, Queensland.

ABC News provided details of 218 of these accounts to Facebook on July 4 and, within a few days, most of them had disappeared off the platform.

Of those 218, almost half of those were profiles of US military personnel serving in Afghanistan who claimed to come from Texas, Queensland.

In the fortnight since these accounts were taken down by Facebook, a new batch of 19 accounts - purporting to be US military personnel serving in Afghanistan who come from Texas, Queensland - have been created.

And there's many more where they came from.

ABC News audited another 500 profiles of people who claim to reside in Texas, Queensland. Only six could be identified as real residents of the town. The vast majority — 448 — contained one or more suspicious signals. And the remaining 46 cases were too hard to tell.

Muhammad Khan is one of those among the 500 accounts identified who both comes from and lives in Texas, Queensland. He joined Facebook in April, 2017. His profile photos show a Caucasian male.

Like many of these suspicious accounts, the photos of Muhammad Khan have almost certainly been swiped from the internet. In order to protect innocent victims of identity theft, we have pixelated the faces of people featured in the examples of fake profiles.

Muhammad Khan is a member of six pro-Trump (and two pro-Bernie Sanders) Facebook groups with names like Trump USA's CEO and Trump Forever. The groups show evidence of bot activity - programmed automated posts designed to mimic human activity.

The account bears all the hallmarks of the kind used to spread fake news and disinformation to influence the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election or profit from advertising opportunities associated with viral traffic.

Investigations in the United States have since found that many of these fake profiles were set-up by foreign operatives.

The accounts linked to Texas, Queensland include people purporting to be US Army generals, Harvard University graduates, fashion models, employees of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and members of illustrious institutes such as the World Health Organisation.

Many of these suspicious accounts are publishing posts in Spanish, Indonesian, Hindi and Arabic.

These fake accounts are not the work of the good folk of Texas, Queensland. It's the bad hombres of the Facebook community who are behind this.

Why Texas, Queensland?

Country music legend Lee Kernaghan put Texas on the map in 2003 with Texas, Qld 4385, his rocking homage to the town which begins like this:

Well people say it's a one horse town,

There's nothing much to do when the sun goes down.

At the set of daylight at the Royal Hotel,

You get a beer, get a feed, get a fight as well.

"That was a few years ago and it's probably still relatively true," said Lester Dawson, the editor of the local community newspaper, the McIntyre Gazette.

"But there's probably a lot more horses than one here now."

Mr Dawson, who is also the secretary of the local chamber of commerce, says the 16-year-old song, tells of another time.

"Things have moved on and Texas is a little more user-friendly these days," he said.

While not a heavy user of Facebook, he said it had become the "bush telegraph" of its day and the local sporting clubs, his own newspaper and the chamber of commerce all had a Facebook presence.

And, no, he had not heard about the Facebook fakes of Texas.

The most logical explanation for why the town finds itself linked to so many Facebook hangers-on is that it's a case of mistaken location.

When fake profiles are set up — especially those operating from locations which might arouse suspicion — it sounds more authentic to say you come from or live in a location in the United States rather than, for instance, Lahore in Pakistan or Lagos in Nigeria.

When filling out a Facebook profile, if you type in "Texas", intending to choose a town in the US state, "Texas, Queensland" is auto-suggested as the third option in the drop down of location names. It comes after "Texas City, Texas" and "Texarkana, Texas", but before more well-known Texan cities such as Dallas, Houston and Austin.

The same pattern of fakes accounts, albeit on a smaller scale, can be seen with Australian towns that share with a name with more well-known North American cities or states. These include places like Miami (Queensland), Virginia (Queensland) and Toronto (New South Wales).

The fake profiles linked to Texas, Queensland are many and varied. Some are still active, others have gone quiet. Though small in number relative to the overall size of the Facebook community, these "bad actors" represent a microcosm of the larger reckoning facing Facebook.

Here are some other examples of the fake profiles uncovered by ABC News:

The fake news promoter

Bella Zoe is one of the people who claim to both come from and live in Texas, Queensland. Bella joined Facebook in May, 2016.

As you can see from the profile photos, he appears to be a man of south Asian appearance. His profile photos feature a Pakistani flag badge with the words: "I'm proud to be a Pakistani".

His posts include sharing an obviously fake breaking news alert from americasfreedomfighters.com with the headline: "BREAKING: Nobel Prize Winner Says TRUMP TO BE ASSASSINATED After Midterms, & He's DEAD SERIOUS!"

Other posts promote pro-Trump, pro-Melania Trump, pro-gun and anti-immigration messages.

The account was one of the examples submitted by ABC News to Facebook and has since been expunged.

The love scammer

A number of the fake profiles appear to be love scammers looking to lure lonely people seeking romance who are then fleeced of their money.

Jordan Smith, a young woman, was one such love scammer. She identified herself as a research assistant at the University of Texas at Austin who lived in and came from Texas, Queensland. She had 14,000 followers, most of them men.

Jordan regularly posted about being lonely. "I haven't been with a man for a few years, it can not continue like this," she wrote in one post.

Her Facebook posts often contained links to a website for people seeking casual sex that she said was "better for chatting" and contained "more pics with me".

Her page was one of the 218 suspicious profiles ABC News submitted to Facebook and has since been deleted.

Australians lost over $9.5 million to dating and romance scams in 2017, according to the ACCC's latest scam report. And for the first time since reporting began, most of the victims — who were mostly women — had been contacted through social media.

The get-rich-quick scammer

Love Taylor claimed to be a dancer at Florida State University where she also studied. Although she claimed to be from Maryville, Tennessee, her profile said she was living in Texas, Queensland.

Almost all her posts promote a get-rich-quick scheme available only to "trustworthy people". The posts often provide a link to a WhatsApp number and photos of various people brandishing wads of money are shown as "evidence" of the successful nature of her enterprise.

Many of the suspect profiles identified appear to be tied to more innocuous scam activities involving the spruiking of businesses or Facebook pages in order to boost patronage or the status of a Facebook page.

There were also many examples of rampant "like farming", where scammers post content — often with emotional lures — on Facebook with the aim of cultivating likes and shares. The more shares and likes, the more credible the Facebook profile or page and the more likely that content is to be propagated.

'Like cockroaches'



Facebook won't reveal the exact way it polices its patch, but it says it uses a number of different data points to determine the authenticity of accounts.

The vast majority of the fake accounts are picked up by machine learning and are "removed within minutes" of being created, said Antonia Sanda, Facebook's head of communication in Australia.

"We are actively working, trying to ensure we are able to remove all of the rest of [the fake accounts]," adds Mia Garlick, Facebook director of policy for Australia and New Zealand.

Texas is a special case, but the prevalence of so many obviously fake accounts puts the scale of Facebook's task in perspective.

"The numbers [of fakes] are vast. And as soon as you tear something down, it's like cockroaches, they'll come back," said Dr David Glance, a senior research fellow at the University of Western Australia's school of physics, mathematics and computing.

"I just don't see that we have any reason to believe that they've solved the problem."

And the fake account problem goes deeper than just spreading fake news and facilitating scams.

Dr Glance believes it is in Facebook's corporate interests to understate the extent of the fake activity and tread lightly on enforcement for fear of scaring off advertisers and spooking investors.

Fake accounts artificially inflate the number of active profiles, upon which Facebook's profitable advertising business is based.

"It goes back to the fact that they're not just deceiving the public, they're deceiving their core business which is the advertisers," Dr Glance said.

"And I have a particular view that it's not quite a scam but it's fairly close to that in the fact that they're marketing all these capabilities for this type of advertising but yet for the vast majority of advertisers, they will see no benefit."

Not so, says Facebook's Ms Garlick.

"The really important thing to keep in mind is that there's ... 16 million people in Australia actively using Facebook and the vast majority of the experiences that people have on the platform are positive."

The unmasking of the fakes of Texas, Queensland comes as Facebook rolls out its "Here Together" campaign, an exercise in reputation repair caused by months of withering criticism over the misuse of private data and revelations about Russian-backed interference in the US democratic process.

As part of its international campaign, Facebook has been running a series of ads in Australia on TV and digital channels, in cinemas and on street billboards and bus shelters around the country.

In part, this public relations campaign is intended to counter the many critics of Facebook (and other tech platforms) who, like Dr Glance, argue it's time for stricter regulation and independent monitoring.

"They are making vast sums of money... and yet it is based on a product which has very little oversight, very little external validation that it actually works."

Moving on

Despite a year of soul-searching after its self-inflicted trauma over the election meddling and the Cambridge Analytica fiasco, Facebook's fortunes appear to have rebounded.

In April, the company posted its first-quarter results showing a boost in daily users and a 50 per cent jump in revenue to $US12 billion, compared to last year's first quarter result of $US8 billion.

Shares in the company have rebounded by 35 per cent since hitting a low in March.

And its valuation of $US600 billion makes Mr Zuckerberg the fourth richest person in the US with a personal fortune estimated to be in excess $US80 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Fakes aside, Facebook already appears to have left its troubles behind.

Topics: social-media, internet-culture, information-and-communication, fraud-and-corporate-crime, qld, australia, texas-4385

First posted