This was created in relation to the issue where Filipinos found dummy accounts in their names. It even caught the attention of the national news. Users report duplicate, dummy Facebook accounts in PH
The purpose of this script it to approximate when these dummy accounts were created to add context to them.
are they old dummy accounts that doesn't have any connection to any of the current events?
There are a few limitations to this though:
In order to parse information from facebook properly one must be authenticated on facebook. I didn't want people to supply their username and passwords so I decided to resort to using cookies. I understand that it isn't better or more secure but at least only those who actually knows what their doing can use the script.
Facebook spam blocks you for a few minutes when doing a lot of requests even via the frontend so use this scarcely.
Since we cannot actually find out when an account is created we can only approximate. One of the ways to do this is to find the earliest activity on that account. First post? first profile picture?
Facebook uses mysql and with any sql data store we know that most id columns are auto incremented. Basically, facebook user ids are sequencial. With that in mind we deduce that the user with user ids before your user id was created before your account, and users with users ids after your user id was created after yours.
It also helps to confirm that the first account on facebook was of Mark Zuckerberg with the user id of 4. 1 to 3 might have been test accounts. But going to www.facebook.com/4 will redirect you to Mark's account.
Since the dummy accounts in question doesn't have any content it is impossible to know the create date so we rely on its neighbors or the users close to its user ids.
- Just download this repo
- Create a text file named
cookie.txtand copy paste your facebook cookies there. - Run the
webservice.exeexecutable. This will run a web server at port 8080. - On your browser go to
http://localhost:8080/fb/fb_username_or_ID, example: http://localhost:8080/fb/madziikoy and wait for awhile and it should return the year the account was created.
There is a lot of room for improvement but I only had an hour to do this. Feel free to fork and improve.
Open your devtools on network tab and refresh your facebook page. Get the cookies from the request headers:
Copy all the cookies and paste it into the cookie.txt file before you run webservice.exe.
This repository is for research purposes only, the use of this code is your responsibility.
I take NO responsibility and/or liability for how you choose to use any of the source code available here. By using any of the files available in this repository, you understand that you are AGREEING TO USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. Once again, ALL files available here are for EDUCATION and/or RESEARCH purposes ONLY.