How quickly do Facebook investigations go?

[cooingcreature790]

Why would Facebook decide to investigate a member's account? How quickly do their investigations go and how thorough are their results? I am curious what sort of tools Facebook uses to accomplish these tasks.

[Prince_Of_Narnia]

Facebook will use data mining techniques to determine spam accounts. They use a number of indicators, the most obvious is friend count and the rate of its expansion, add more than X amount of friends in one day and you get a message from facebook telling you you can't add any more within the next 24 hours.

Data mining will look at the number of friends you have got and see how many interactions you have with them, if there are too many friends and far too little interaction then you will be flagged for further investigation.

Further investigation looks at how many links you post and how often, to external sites and reetitive links to a single site. Spam messaging is also taken into consideration, the frequency and content of your messages to other members [yes facebook can read your messages] and the saturation of external links in the messages is also taken into consideration.

There are many many more variables such as the number of applications etc and the amount of info you have filled out about yourself etc that is taken into account; the facebook investigation process is almost entrely automated but if your account is flagged in error you can contact them and they will reinstate it. Investigation of a single account would take about 1 to 5 minutes maybe less maybe more depending on the volume of information but it does happen very quickly

Everyday users even excessive addicts won't be affected nor will people who hardly use facebook at all, the data mining process will cater for outliers.

Oh and as I understand it facebook perform the check once a month on a random sample of accounts, but every so many months they perform an extensive sample using many accounts; the latter happens once every 6 months as I am aware.