When you sign up for Facebook on your phone, the app isn't just giving you the latest updates and photos from your friends and family. In the background, it's utilizing the phone's gyroscope to detect subtle movements that come from breathing. It's measuring how quickly you tap on the screen, and even looking at what angle the phone is being held.
Sound creepy? These are just some of the ways that Facebook is verifying that you're actually human and not one of the tens of millions of bots attempting to invade the social network each day.
That Facebook would go to such lengths underscores the escalation of the war between tech companies and bots that can cause chaos in politics and damage public trust. Facebook isn't alone. Twitter on Wednesday began removing millions of blocked accounts, and Google is looking to stamp out malicious trolls on YouTube.
The road to salvation, they believe, is paved with artificial intelligence. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly pointed to AI as a solution to his social network's flaws during his testimony before Congress and again at the company's F8 developers conference. Google wants to be an AI-first company and Twitter likewise wants to use the technology to stamp out trolls.
"It is already pretty much a fundamental part of everyday life," Michael Connor, the executive director of Open MIC, a technology policy nonprofit, said. "AI is becoming part of the way we listen to music, how we handle our medical issues, and how we drive our cars."
AI's been prescribed as a cure-all remedy, able to fix all the problems that plague the internet. After all, no single person or human team could ever deal with the flood of data coming from billions of users. But how does it work? CNET got an inside look at how Google, Twitter and Facebook use AI to manage abuse on a massive scale.
Artificial intelligence works best with lots of data -- something Facebook, Google and Twitter have no shortage of. If you're training a bot to find fake news, for example, you'd amass a ton of posts that you judge as fake news and tell your algorithm to look for posts similar to them.
Think of this machine learning like the process of teaching a newborn baby the difference between right and wrong, said Kevin Lee, Sift Science's trust and safety architect.
That's why AI will sometimes get things wrong, which is how blatant examples of abuse get past an algorithm. Or on the opposite end of the spectrum, why analgorithm considers harmless images abusive. When there's little transparency, people get skeptical.
But there's a method behind the machine-learning madness.
Cybercriminals are becoming more savvy. They employ bots that act like a hive when it comes to creating accounts on Facebook, using multiple tricks to fool the massive social network. They will use fake IP addresses, slow down their pace to match a human's and add each other as digital alibis.
But they still haven't figured out how to fake human movement.
The massive social network has been relying on outside AI resources, as well as its own team, to help it close the floodgates on bots. One such resource is Israeli startup Unbotify, which two people familiar with Unbotify confirmed was working with Facebook to detect bots.
Eran Magril, the startup's vice president of product and operations, said Unbotify works by understanding behavioral data on devices, such as how fast your phone is moving when you sign up for an account. His algorithm recognizes these patterns because it was trained on thousands of workers who repeatedly tapped and swiped their phones. Bots can fake IP addresses, but they can't fake how a person would physically interact with a device.
Magril declined to confirm Unbotify's relationship with Facebook, but said the company works with major social networks. Facebook also declined to comment about Unbotify.
Facebook has tried to fight off the scourge by doubling its content moderation team to 20,000 employees.
