Making it more difficult to shill recommender systems

Lately I've been thinking about recommender algorithms and how they go wrong. I keep hitting examples of people arguing that we should ban the fewest accounts possible when thinking about what accounts are used by recommender systems. Why? Or why not the opposite? What's wrong with using the fewest accounts you can without degrading the perceived quality of the recommendations?

The reason this matters is that recommender systems these days are struggling with shilling. Companies are playing whack-a-mole with bad actors who just create new accounts or find new shills every time they're whacked because it's so profitable -- like free advertising -- to create fake crowds that manipulate the algorithms. Propagandists and scammers are loving it and winning. It's easy and lucrative for them.

So what's wrong with taking the opposite strategy, only using the most reliable accounts? As a thought experiment, let's say you rank order accounts by your confidence they are human, independent, not shilling, and trustworthy. Then go down the list of accounts, using their behavior data until the recommendations stop improving at a noticeable level (being careful about cold start and the long tail). Then stop. Don't use the rest. Why not do that? It'd vastly increase costs for adversaries. And it wouldn't change the perceived quality of recommendations because you've made sure it wouldn't.

The traditional approach to this is to classify accounts as spam or shills separate from how the data will be used. The classifiers minimize the error rates (false positive and false negative), then treat all borderline cases as not spam. The idea here is to do almost the opposite of that traditional approach, classify accounts as trustworthy, then use only those, ignoring anything unknown or borderline as well as known spammers and shills.

This works because how the data will be used as well as the bad incentives for spammers and propagandists are really sensitive to false negatives (letting in any manipulation at all of the recommender algorithms) but not very sensitive to false positives (accidentally not using some of the data that might have actually been fine to use). Letting in even one shill can badly impact recommenders, especially when shills target getting new content trending, but using less data of the lower quality data doesn't usually change the recommendations in ways that matter for people.

This isn't my idea or a new idea, by the way. It's actually a quite old idea, talked about in papers like TrustRank, Anti-TrustRank, and Wisdom of the Few, and similar techniques are applied already by companies like Google for dealing with web spam.

The world has changed in the last decade. Especially on social media, there is rampant manipulation of wisdom of the crowd data such as likes and shares. A big part of the problem is the algorithms like trending, search, and recommender systems that pick up the manipulated data and use it to amplify shilled content. That makes it quite profitable and easy for disinformation and scams.

Places like Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter are swimming in data, but their problem is that a lot of it is untrustworthy and shilled. But you don't need to use all the data. Toss big data happily, anything suspicious at all, false positives galore accidentally marking new accounts or borderline accounts as shills when deciding what to input to the recommender algorithms. Who cares if you do?