Reading an Account's History

Accounts are cheap and history is not

Anyone can make a profile in five minutes. What nobody can fabricate quickly is years of other people treating that profile as a person.

So do not read the profile. Read what surrounds it.

What thin actually looks like

Photographs that all arrived within a short window, often with a gap of years before them, or none at all before this spring.

Interaction that runs one way. Posts with no replies, or replies only from accounts that are themselves thin. Real accounts accumulate irrelevant evidence: an argument about a football result, somebody's birthday, a badly photographed lunch.

Connections that do not overlap. A person who has lived somewhere for a decade knows people who know each other. A list of hundreds of contacts with no clusters in it is a list that was assembled rather than grown.

Tagged photographs are the strongest single signal, because they require somebody else to have participated. They are also the hardest thing to fake at volume.

Two honest cautions

A thin profile is common among real people. Plenty of perfectly genuine adults joined recently, post nothing, and know four people. Thinness raises a question; it does not answer one.

A rich profile can be stolen wholesale. Duplicated accounts copy years of someone else's material at once. If the history looks unusually good, search the name and see whether there are two.

What this check is really for

Not a verdict. A calibration. If somebody has been talking to you for six weeks with an intensity that implies a real life, and their account contains no evidence that this life is observed by anybody else, those two facts are in conflict — and it is the intensity that should be re-examined, not the account.