10 ms·

Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

121 points by iProject 14y ago

Jgrubb 14y ago
I'd have guessed it would've been at least twice that many. I recently opened up an account for the sole purpose of being able to get into their API docs and haven't been back since. Am I a fake user?
- JD557 14y ago
  Same here. I needed to work with their API, so I made a fake account to make some test and to access the documentation. I have no intention of having my own facebook account, much less to have it full of debuging messages. If I created a real account, it would only annoy my real friend with messages such as "Test 1" and "sadsadasd".
xSwag 14y ago
There are a lot of people offering 1000 Facebook page likes for just $5 on websites like Fiverr. I've seen profiles that have had no status updates but has 5k pages liked. There is a LOT of social media spam on Facebook
- unreal37 14y ago
  I bet Facebook has already identified that as "undesirables".
swombat 14y ago
Worth noting that not all these "fakes" are bad, or even inactive or less active. For example, most performers on the Burlesque scene have accounts specifically for their Burlesque personas, with names like "Kitty Cupcake" or "Tabitha Taboo" and the like. These are obviously not their real names, but a consequence of the fact that Burlesque performers don't want the offline attention on their personal or professional lives outside the performing scene, and that it is standard on that scene to have an alternate identity, in the real world, who is the Burlesque artist. The two identities are cleanly separated in real life as well as online, and they tend to use Facebook online to network with each other, get gigs, post photos, accrue fans, and so on. I know several such artists who can't be bothered to update their personal Facebook profile much, but are very active Facebook users under their Burlesque pseudonym, with many friends/fans/connections. To consider these accounts "fake" seems, to me, like a mistake. These are very legitimate use of a social networking platform. It would be a mistake for Facebook to target such accounts and close them down. They would generate immense bad will amongst an increasingly influential community of artists.
- jgroome 14y ago
  Good point. I also know for a fact that a lot of underground (and not-so-underground) musicians use a standard Profile for their Facebook presence instead of a Page, as well as a Profile for their real identity. Is this using the system wrong? Yes. Are they getting the full benefits of Facebook when managing their online fanbase? No. Do they care? Nope.
- rmc 14y ago
  This is the nymwars again.
- veyron 14y ago
  "an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account." The problem there is that a person trying hard to keep personas separate can do so without Facebook being able to track (I assume they have to be more specific than just matching by IP address).
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    Re: Matching IP address - given the prevalence of NAT, in which several thousand users will be associated with a single IP address - you can't rely on that. Cookies, on the other hand, or, browser-fingerprint-matching, probably can be used to identify these shill accounts. I wonder if Facebook knows how many of it's accounts are fake, or if they actively avoid looking into that information.
    - Zimahl 14y ago
      Then again, while it is common for us 'computer folk' to have more than 1 computer, a lot of households have just 1 shared by many people. My sister's family has 1 shared computer with 3 Facebook users (soon to be 4 in a year or two).
- lusr 14y ago
  My ex-girlfriend used a second Facebook profile to earn rewards in the *ville games (or something, I have no idea how those games work). Truly fake secondary accounts like that are probably quite common given the popularity of those games. All of this just demonstrates that using "monthly active users" as a metric is meaningless and Facebook need better and more well thought out metrics.
jaredstenquist 14y ago
I can account for atleast 100 of those. Any company who relies heavily on Facebook for registration and auth likely creates many on a regular basis for testing.
- bretkoppel 14y ago
  I, too, have several accounts that either predate test users or predate my knowledge of them. Still easier to use them than the test accounts occasionally.
jgroome 14y ago
Been using Facebook every day since 2007. Recently though I've noticed my visits to the site drop to maybe once or twice per day, whereas at its peak I was checking it multiple times per hour. I think in their desire to work out what exactly makes them money, they've changed the way you're supposed to use the site. Where I used to see a news feed full of (mostly mundane but still interesting) status updates and photos from my friends, I'm increasingly bombarded with Shares, memes, comics, and pictures that would have been derided as old on 4chan back in 2006. Now we're hearing about "fake users" - not the fault of the company themselves, I'm sure - and how FB is now just a place where tech marketing people see imagined riches. And in the process, they've ruined the site for the rest of us. The less pleasant the website experience, the less people will want to use it. Before long it'll just be dummy accounts and bots on the site. Barring a major change of attitude and user experience, I would be surprised if I'm still using the site this time next year.
- Andrenid 14y ago
  My massive decline in use is directly correlated to how annoying they've made it to use. Eg: You can't have your feed always sort by "Most Recent", it keeps defaulting to "Top Stories", keeping old/stagnant stories at the top of my feed just because they got a few comments, while not showing me the new stuff. Also, the sheer amount of crap they shove in your face now. "<friend name> Likes TOYOTA!" then a big post by Toyota shoved front and center of my feed, all because that friend Liked that page a few months back. Also, the annoying way that you can't ignore just a certain type of post from friends (bar a few). You can set them to "Important Updates Only" but then you miss lots of posts you might find interesting. I want to ignore their Likes of memes/pictures but still get their posts of their own content, etc. There's lots more reasons, but they've basically made the site a pain in the ass to use, so I find myself back to reading sites via RSS and chatting to people directly on Google Talk when I need some "social".
  - malenm 14y ago
    -You can set them to "Important Updates Only" but then you miss lots of posts you might find interesting. I want to ignore their Likes of memes/pictures but still get their posts of their own content, etc. There is actually a setting for this - You need to "Unsubscribe from comments and likes by ___" I worked vigilantly at this over a few weeks and eventually my feed went back to what it used to look like circa 2008. Then, sadly, a few weeks ago, they were all back one day out of the blue. Since then, the unsubscribe functionality has been straight-up broken. https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2297060 https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2297060 https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2300268 https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2300268
mootothemax 14y ago
I wonder how many of these fake accounts are "test" accounts from before the time that Facebook introduced official test accounts? Or even from developers unaware of the proper test accounts that can be used. I think I had three or four accounts set up years ago to test various bits of functionality, such as sending invites and status updates. The introduction of proper test accounts was a godsend!
veyron 14y ago
Even the financial people are questioning FB numbers: http://seekingalpha.com/article/773061-facebook-cannot-survive-on-mobile-despite-others-best-wishes http://seekingalpha.com/article/773061-facebook-cannot-survi...
mmphosis 14y ago
I create a fake account everytime that I have a need to enter Facebook's walled garden.
- wpietri 14y ago
  Have you needed to enter Facebook about 83 million times? If so, you should let them know they can stop analyzing the problem.
human_error 14y ago
I believe the number is way higher than 83 million. I have 5 facebook accounts that I use most of them for testing apps.
muyuu 14y ago
I thought FB did most of its stats on "active" accounts? Surely there are many millions of abandoned and testing accounts.
- tatsuke95 14y ago
  How could they tell what is active? I mean really tell? It's difficult. Besides, the more accounts they can report as active, the more "reach" they can sell to advertisers, and the higher the prices advertisers have to pay for that space.
  - muyuu 14y ago
    It's difficult with strong accuracy, with a 5% margin I don't think it's hard. Sure they can fake their reports, but they do know quite well how many active users they have.
    - georgespencer 14y ago
      Active users are probably the key to identifying fake and inactive users. There are likely to be patterns of use on Facebook from active users which apply themselves irrespective of whether a given user is a power user, casual user, etc. Adding friends, sending messages, checking other people's walls, having other people check their wall. Anyone who doesn't conform to this pattern to within about 10% either side (not enough use / too much use) is probably a fake or spam account.
    - tatsuke95 14y ago
      Okay, agreed that it can be done with some margin of error. I think 5% is fair. But if 1 out of 20 "fake" accounts that are active are closed down by mistake, that's millions of pissed off customers and customer support emails. In other words, a massive headache. That's a problem.
bmunro 14y ago
I have a 'fake' account. It's used purely for logging into Spotify, as there is no other way to get a Spotify account.
- ServerGeek 14y ago
  I also have a 'fake' account I use for Spotify, as well as to like random stuff without bothering/pissing-off my friends and family.
zizee 14y ago
Whist we're at it I'd love to see the stats for twitter. How many of their users are actually active? Or those active users how many are real people an not bots?
- linker3000 14y ago
  I have not used my Twitter account for over two years, yet it gathers about 3-4 new followers a week so there's a significant amount of pointless activity created by automated processes that just follow people based on keywords - or maybe there's a lot of people who like my extended period of thoughful silence.
  - obtu 14y ago
    The spam followers I pick up seem to target lists of “followers of X”, where X is marginally topical to their spam.
oron 14y ago
on http://getairmail.com http://getairmail.com (shameless plug) the facebook and twitter email servers are very popular when looking at incoming mail domains. Some accounts create dozens of fake accounts in a single session.
conradfr 14y ago
I am in a complicated relationship on FB with my fish. Who has a lot more fish and human friends than me (~800 against 99). Never understood how he gets new friend requests everyday.
- freehunter 14y ago
  I did an experiment a few years ago where I set up a profile for someone who supposedly went to my university. His pictures were pulled from the profile of a male model, the rest was all made up. I went through every profile I could get and sent friend requests. I actually hit the 5000 friends limit. Usually I would send a message saying "hey we met at X party last night!" if I could find that information on their public profile. Many of the people "remembered" that. The account still gets people wishing him happy birthday.
  - conradfr 14y ago
    Notbad.jpg The funny thing is that I NEVER asked anyone from my fish account and he now has friends from all over the world, while his name is "My fish Ploup" in French. About your fake account and its birthday wishes, An experiment could be to put a erroneous birthday date. I guess that day you can get a lot of wishes, even from close friends. We are just lazy I guess.
    - zipdog 14y ago
      I tried that experiment, and the first couple of years it was about 50/50, but most recently almost everyone who posted did so on the FB birthday date. I think theyv'e come to rely on the Facebook reminders. It was also interesting to see the cognitive dissonance from some posts: "I'm pretty sure it was your birthday next week, but Facebook says its this week, so Happy Birthday".
      - freehunter 14y ago
        Of my friends who are friends but not best friends, I only know one of their birthdays. I only know that because her Xbox Live gamertag has her birth month and day in it (and she was born one year and one month before me, kind of interesting I guess). Birthdays are a thing that are hard to remember. People used to mark them down on a calendar or just wait for the person to remind them. Both of those functions have been replaced with Facebook now.
janlukacs 14y ago
Don't use it, never will. All the privacy related issues keep me from going there. There are also more pleasant ways to waste time...
ck2 14y ago
Any time a company requires facebook to get a coupon or freebie or whatever, I always make a new junk account and then trash the email and cookies and never use it again. Not going to be a victim of their tracking nonsense.
ServerGeek 14y ago
Sounds about right.. I guess. I have a fake account that I use just to like random bullshit and to also use to sign into random stuff. It's kinda like having an email account you use to send you spam too.
thatusertwo 14y ago
I'd figure it was much higher than that. Over the years I've had at least 5 accounts and the woman from the movie 'Catfish' had over 20 accounts.
unreal37 14y ago
I think calling them "fake" users is incorrect and misleading. The majority, as the article states, are real people with two or more accounts. Two accounts represents an easy way to separate your personal and professional lives. Instead of fretting over the privacy settings of each picture, setting up lists, using the complicated and changing processes for managing privacy on FB, the "easy" way is to create two separate personas. And there is nothing wrong with this. Performers needed to do this, since Facebook "Pages" and "subscribing without friending" are relatively new. And plenty of people who feel the need to be Facebook friends with people from work who don't want them seeing their personal lives and high school photos. And people hiding from ex-husbands and stalkers and other privacy-aware people who want to be on FB, publically findable, but keep a lot of stuff truly hidden. There are a lot of people who value their privacy and doesn't provide real birthdays (Jan 1 1900), real pictures, real interests and likes, announce who their relatives are, and relationship statuses... are they fake? The system has to account for people who need two accounts or incomplete accounts. I don't see how this harms Facebook in any way, or why the BBC needs to portray this as if there's a massive problem. Spam accounts and bots... that's another thing entirely.
- tatsuke95 14y ago
  >"I don't see how this harms Facebook in any way" When an advertiser buys a Facebook ad, he is able to narrow down the target audience based on demographic information. Facebook then tells the advertiser the "reach" of that ad. So, if I want to advertise to Males between the ages of 18 and 24, from the UK, who like Ford, Facebook will tell me how many people my ad can reach. That's what you pay for. As an advertiser I will have historical advertising figures to calculate the ROI on this ad. But what happens when many of the accounts I'm "reaching" aren't really male, aren't really between the ages of 18 and 24, aren't really from the UK and are owned by people who don't really like Ford? My ROI is skewed. I'm wasting money. It bears repeating: as a Facebook user, you are not the customer. The advertiser is the customer. Users are not harmed by fake accounts, but advertisers are. If your cat Fluffy has an account, and is listed as a male, someone, somewhere is paying to advertise to him. Same goes for Bobone, Bobtwo, Bobthree and all the other accounts you've created to "add friends" in Farmville. That's how Facebook is harmed by this.
ghshephard 14y ago
After being a full time-500+friend user of Facebook since the days when you required your university account to sign up, I finally got around to deleting my account on Facebook. Moved my close family, including my five year old niece, and my six "actual" friends over to Path (well, five of six. #6 doesn't have a smart phone, ironic that my five year old niece does (her father's old 3GS)) I realized one of the nice things about Path is - not sticky at all. No extended timelines, or history that you typically see. 99% of the time you are interested in the last five or six updates only. What this means, is that moving off of Path will be trivial once the eventual commercialization pollutes what is currently a great user experience. (No Ads, No Distractions) Great for us, not so great for Path, I guess. Oh, and the fact that I spend a grand total of 5 minutes a day on Path (Less time than I've spent writing this post) - is also appreciated.
- petitmiam 14y ago
  Did you have much trouble convincing your friends to move to Path? I think that's the biggest headache for anyone wanting to move away.
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    So - Path has a nice feature that lets you post pictures _through_ to Facebook, so for my friends who love Facebook, they can continue to post to Facebook through path. For my friends who have smart phones, but don't like social network, but like smart phones - straight forward - we finally have a reasonably private place for us to share stuff. I'm not trying to convince more than half a dozen people to move though - so, don't really need the same uptake as Facebook.
    - petitmiam 14y ago
      Sounds interesting, I'll give it a shot.
carerra 14y ago
I would venture to estimate many of the fake account have few friends but many thousands of likes to products and services. These are not users you want to include in your advertising campaign, but inevitably do.
carerra 14y ago
I would venture to estimate many of the fake accounts have few friends but many thousands of likes to products and services. These are not users you want to include in your advertising campaign, but inevitably do.
january14n 14y ago
I think they should labeled those 83 million as "SPAM" users.
tokenadult 14y ago
From the submitted article: "User-misclassified accounts amounted to 2.4% - including personal profiles for businesses or pets" The dog owned by my niece in Taiwan has been on Facebook for more than a year. (I haven't bothered to friend the dog, but I keep up with my niece's news via Facebook.) "Duplicate profiles - belonging to already registered users - made up 4.8% of its membership figure." I have plenty of American friends (mostly married women with children) who use pseudonyms, and plenty of those have more than one Facebook account to distinguish personal friends from work colleagues. "Last month, the BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones set up a fake company called VirtualBagel to investigate allegations of fake 'likes'." The BBC investigation confirms what most of us regular Facebook users know from personal experience. A lot of what looks like user engagement on Facebook is just faking or fooling around, not something on which to build an estimate of future monetization of Facebook. I'm still not seeing how Facebook can do any better than AOL did at increasing monetization without driving down the satisfaction of users.
ph33r 14y ago
A friend of mine has a Facebook account for his dog.... tags pictures of him with the dog, and captions the photos: "This is my human... he picks up my poop hehe" My head hurts when I think that 82,999,999 more of these accounts exist.
moreorless 14y ago
Facebook wishes it "only" has 83 million "fake" users. I used to run a very popular forum and more than 80% of the registered accounts were nothing more than spam or troll accounts. Let's give FB the benefit of the doubt and say that they only have 15%.
rco8786 14y ago
That means they have 700+ million 'real' users.
at-fates-hands 14y ago
I think some of these can be explained as hacked accounts. I've had more than one friend who got their accounts hacked and FB wouldn't do anything to reset their password or give them back control. They just simply created another account and just forgot about the old account.
dangerboysteve 14y ago
I have 2 fake account and a real account. The fakes are used for testing. I believe the 83Million number is understated and that should be at least double. I know of 3 separate individuals that have multiple accounts. One personal and one for business.
Kilimanjaro 14y ago
I'll say this, facebook is dying. But the new king is not G+, no. Demographically speaking, FB users like gossip, while G+ users like quality. Mom will never go to G+ and I will never go to FB. So, there is a need for a new facebook and G+ is not the answer. I dare to say something like pinterest, with a river of short messages and pictures, but highly visual, will replace FB. No ads, no apps, no likes, no stupidity in the name of profits, no privacy whoring. That's the new facebook.
- tomjakubowski 14y ago
  No ads? Pinterest essentially presents nothing but ads.
  - Kilimanjaro 14y ago
    Like pinterest, in the visual sense, but about family, friends and celebrities, not ads. Something that floods me with gossip and pics, people talking about people, like a reddit for the family. I won't use a service like that, like I don't use pinterest, but that is exactly what will take FB's place in the future. My personal digg, shared with family and friends.
epo 14y ago
Facebook have to admit they have fake accounts because it would defy credulity to suggest otherwise. They also have to vastly understate the number otherwise their advertisers would sue or flee in droves. So the only question is to what degree they are lying. I would suggest that from an advertiser's perspective the real number of fake accounts is at least 25%, probably much higher.

121 points by iProject 14y ago

I'd have guessed it would've been at least twice that many. I recently opened up an account for the sole purpose of being able to get into their API docs and haven't been back since. Am I a fake user?

JD557 14y ago
Same here. I needed to work with their API, so I made a fake account to make some test and to access the documentation. I have no intention of having my own facebook account, much less to have it full of debuging messages. If I created a real account, it would only annoy my real friend with messages such as "Test 1" and "sadsadasd".

xSwag 14y ago

There are a lot of people offering 1000 Facebook page likes for just $5 on websites like Fiverr. I've seen profiles that have had no status updates but has 5k pages liked. There is a LOT of social media spam on Facebook

unreal37 14y ago
I bet Facebook has already identified that as "undesirables".

swombat 14y ago

Worth noting that not all these "fakes" are bad, or even inactive or less active. For example, most performers on the Burlesque scene have accounts specifically for their Burlesque personas, with names like "Kitty Cupcake" or "Tabitha Taboo" and the like. These are obviously not their real names, but a consequence of the fact that Burlesque performers don't want the offline attention on their personal or professional lives outside the performing scene, and that it is standard on that scene to have an alternate identity, in the real world, who is the Burlesque artist. The two identities are cleanly separated in real life as well as online, and they tend to use Facebook online to network with each other, get gigs, post photos, accrue fans, and so on. I know several such artists who can't be bothered to update their personal Facebook profile much, but are very active Facebook users under their Burlesque pseudonym, with many friends/fans/connections. To consider these accounts "fake" seems, to me, like a mistake. These are very legitimate use of a social networking platform. It would be a mistake for Facebook to target such accounts and close them down. They would generate immense bad will amongst an increasingly influential community of artists.

jgroome 14y ago
Good point. I also know for a fact that a lot of underground (and not-so-underground) musicians use a standard Profile for their Facebook presence instead of a Page, as well as a Profile for their real identity. Is this using the system wrong? Yes. Are they getting the full benefits of Facebook when managing their online fanbase? No. Do they care? Nope.
rmc 14y ago
This is the nymwars again.
veyron 14y ago
"an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account." The problem there is that a person trying hard to keep personas separate can do so without Facebook being able to track (I assume they have to be more specific than just matching by IP address).
- ghshephard 14y ago
  Re: Matching IP address - given the prevalence of NAT, in which several thousand users will be associated with a single IP address - you can't rely on that. Cookies, on the other hand, or, browser-fingerprint-matching, probably can be used to identify these shill accounts. I wonder if Facebook knows how many of it's accounts are fake, or if they actively avoid looking into that information.
  - Zimahl 14y ago
    Then again, while it is common for us 'computer folk' to have more than 1 computer, a lot of households have just 1 shared by many people. My sister's family has 1 shared computer with 3 Facebook users (soon to be 4 in a year or two).
lusr 14y ago
My ex-girlfriend used a second Facebook profile to earn rewards in the *ville games (or something, I have no idea how those games work). Truly fake secondary accounts like that are probably quite common given the popularity of those games. All of this just demonstrates that using "monthly active users" as a metric is meaningless and Facebook need better and more well thought out metrics.

jaredstenquist 14y ago

I can account for atleast 100 of those. Any company who relies heavily on Facebook for registration and auth likely creates many on a regular basis for testing.

bretkoppel 14y ago
I, too, have several accounts that either predate test users or predate my knowledge of them. Still easier to use them than the test accounts occasionally.

jgroome 14y ago

Been using Facebook every day since 2007. Recently though I've noticed my visits to the site drop to maybe once or twice per day, whereas at its peak I was checking it multiple times per hour. I think in their desire to work out what exactly makes them money, they've changed the way you're supposed to use the site. Where I used to see a news feed full of (mostly mundane but still interesting) status updates and photos from my friends, I'm increasingly bombarded with Shares, memes, comics, and pictures that would have been derided as old on 4chan back in 2006. Now we're hearing about "fake users" - not the fault of the company themselves, I'm sure - and how FB is now just a place where tech marketing people see imagined riches. And in the process, they've ruined the site for the rest of us. The less pleasant the website experience, the less people will want to use it. Before long it'll just be dummy accounts and bots on the site. Barring a major change of attitude and user experience, I would be surprised if I'm still using the site this time next year.

Andrenid 14y ago
My massive decline in use is directly correlated to how annoying they've made it to use. Eg: You can't have your feed always sort by "Most Recent", it keeps defaulting to "Top Stories", keeping old/stagnant stories at the top of my feed just because they got a few comments, while not showing me the new stuff. Also, the sheer amount of crap they shove in your face now. "<friend name> Likes TOYOTA!" then a big post by Toyota shoved front and center of my feed, all because that friend Liked that page a few months back. Also, the annoying way that you can't ignore just a certain type of post from friends (bar a few). You can set them to "Important Updates Only" but then you miss lots of posts you might find interesting. I want to ignore their Likes of memes/pictures but still get their posts of their own content, etc. There's lots more reasons, but they've basically made the site a pain in the ass to use, so I find myself back to reading sites via RSS and chatting to people directly on Google Talk when I need some "social".
- malenm 14y ago
  -You can set them to "Important Updates Only" but then you miss lots of posts you might find interesting. I want to ignore their Likes of memes/pictures but still get their posts of their own content, etc. There is actually a setting for this - You need to "Unsubscribe from comments and likes by ___" I worked vigilantly at this over a few weeks and eventually my feed went back to what it used to look like circa 2008. Then, sadly, a few weeks ago, they were all back one day out of the blue. Since then, the unsubscribe functionality has been straight-up broken. https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2297060 https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2297060 https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2300268 https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=2300268

mootothemax 14y ago

I wonder how many of these fake accounts are "test" accounts from before the time that Facebook introduced official test accounts? Or even from developers unaware of the proper test accounts that can be used. I think I had three or four accounts set up years ago to test various bits of functionality, such as sending invites and status updates. The introduction of proper test accounts was a godsend!

veyron 14y ago

Even the financial people are questioning FB numbers: http://seekingalpha.com/article/773061-facebook-cannot-survive-on-mobile-despite-others-best-wishes http://seekingalpha.com/article/773061-facebook-cannot-survi...

mmphosis 14y ago

I create a fake account everytime that I have a need to enter Facebook's walled garden.

wpietri 14y ago
Have you needed to enter Facebook about 83 million times? If so, you should let them know they can stop analyzing the problem.

human_error 14y ago

I believe the number is way higher than 83 million. I have 5 facebook accounts that I use most of them for testing apps.

muyuu 14y ago

I thought FB did most of its stats on "active" accounts? Surely there are many millions of abandoned and testing accounts.

tatsuke95 14y ago
How could they tell what is active? I mean really tell? It's difficult. Besides, the more accounts they can report as active, the more "reach" they can sell to advertisers, and the higher the prices advertisers have to pay for that space.
- muyuu 14y ago
  It's difficult with strong accuracy, with a 5% margin I don't think it's hard. Sure they can fake their reports, but they do know quite well how many active users they have.
  - georgespencer 14y ago
    Active users are probably the key to identifying fake and inactive users. There are likely to be patterns of use on Facebook from active users which apply themselves irrespective of whether a given user is a power user, casual user, etc. Adding friends, sending messages, checking other people's walls, having other people check their wall. Anyone who doesn't conform to this pattern to within about 10% either side (not enough use / too much use) is probably a fake or spam account.
  - tatsuke95 14y ago
    Okay, agreed that it can be done with some margin of error. I think 5% is fair. But if 1 out of 20 "fake" accounts that are active are closed down by mistake, that's millions of pissed off customers and customer support emails. In other words, a massive headache. That's a problem.

bmunro 14y ago

I have a 'fake' account. It's used purely for logging into Spotify, as there is no other way to get a Spotify account.

ServerGeek 14y ago
I also have a 'fake' account I use for Spotify, as well as to like random stuff without bothering/pissing-off my friends and family.

zizee 14y ago

Whist we're at it I'd love to see the stats for twitter. How many of their users are actually active? Or those active users how many are real people an not bots?

linker3000 14y ago
I have not used my Twitter account for over two years, yet it gathers about 3-4 new followers a week so there's a significant amount of pointless activity created by automated processes that just follow people based on keywords - or maybe there's a lot of people who like my extended period of thoughful silence.
- obtu 14y ago
  The spam followers I pick up seem to target lists of “followers of X”, where X is marginally topical to their spam.

oron 14y ago

on http://getairmail.com http://getairmail.com (shameless plug) the facebook and twitter email servers are very popular when looking at incoming mail domains. Some accounts create dozens of fake accounts in a single session.

conradfr 14y ago

I am in a complicated relationship on FB with my fish. Who has a lot more fish and human friends than me (~800 against 99). Never understood how he gets new friend requests everyday.

freehunter 14y ago
I did an experiment a few years ago where I set up a profile for someone who supposedly went to my university. His pictures were pulled from the profile of a male model, the rest was all made up. I went through every profile I could get and sent friend requests. I actually hit the 5000 friends limit. Usually I would send a message saying "hey we met at X party last night!" if I could find that information on their public profile. Many of the people "remembered" that. The account still gets people wishing him happy birthday.
- conradfr 14y ago
  Notbad.jpg The funny thing is that I NEVER asked anyone from my fish account and he now has friends from all over the world, while his name is "My fish Ploup" in French. About your fake account and its birthday wishes, An experiment could be to put a erroneous birthday date. I guess that day you can get a lot of wishes, even from close friends. We are just lazy I guess.
  - zipdog 14y ago
    I tried that experiment, and the first couple of years it was about 50/50, but most recently almost everyone who posted did so on the FB birthday date. I think theyv'e come to rely on the Facebook reminders. It was also interesting to see the cognitive dissonance from some posts: "I'm pretty sure it was your birthday next week, but Facebook says its this week, so Happy Birthday".
    - freehunter 14y ago
      Of my friends who are friends but not best friends, I only know one of their birthdays. I only know that because her Xbox Live gamertag has her birth month and day in it (and she was born one year and one month before me, kind of interesting I guess). Birthdays are a thing that are hard to remember. People used to mark them down on a calendar or just wait for the person to remind them. Both of those functions have been replaced with Facebook now.

janlukacs 14y ago

Don't use it, never will. All the privacy related issues keep me from going there. There are also more pleasant ways to waste time...

ck2 14y ago

Any time a company requires facebook to get a coupon or freebie or whatever, I always make a new junk account and then trash the email and cookies and never use it again. Not going to be a victim of their tracking nonsense.

ServerGeek 14y ago

Sounds about right.. I guess. I have a fake account that I use just to like random bullshit and to also use to sign into random stuff. It's kinda like having an email account you use to send you spam too.

thatusertwo 14y ago

I'd figure it was much higher than that. Over the years I've had at least 5 accounts and the woman from the movie 'Catfish' had over 20 accounts.

unreal37 14y ago

I think calling them "fake" users is incorrect and misleading. The majority, as the article states, are real people with two or more accounts. Two accounts represents an easy way to separate your personal and professional lives. Instead of fretting over the privacy settings of each picture, setting up lists, using the complicated and changing processes for managing privacy on FB, the "easy" way is to create two separate personas. And there is nothing wrong with this. Performers needed to do this, since Facebook "Pages" and "subscribing without friending" are relatively new. And plenty of people who feel the need to be Facebook friends with people from work who don't want them seeing their personal lives and high school photos. And people hiding from ex-husbands and stalkers and other privacy-aware people who want to be on FB, publically findable, but keep a lot of stuff truly hidden. There are a lot of people who value their privacy and doesn't provide real birthdays (Jan 1 1900), real pictures, real interests and likes, announce who their relatives are, and relationship statuses... are they fake? The system has to account for people who need two accounts or incomplete accounts. I don't see how this harms Facebook in any way, or why the BBC needs to portray this as if there's a massive problem. Spam accounts and bots... that's another thing entirely.

tatsuke95 14y ago
>"I don't see how this harms Facebook in any way" When an advertiser buys a Facebook ad, he is able to narrow down the target audience based on demographic information. Facebook then tells the advertiser the "reach" of that ad. So, if I want to advertise to Males between the ages of 18 and 24, from the UK, who like Ford, Facebook will tell me how many people my ad can reach. That's what you pay for. As an advertiser I will have historical advertising figures to calculate the ROI on this ad. But what happens when many of the accounts I'm "reaching" aren't really male, aren't really between the ages of 18 and 24, aren't really from the UK and are owned by people who don't really like Ford? My ROI is skewed. I'm wasting money. It bears repeating: as a Facebook user, you are not the customer. The advertiser is the customer. Users are not harmed by fake accounts, but advertisers are. If your cat Fluffy has an account, and is listed as a male, someone, somewhere is paying to advertise to him. Same goes for Bobone, Bobtwo, Bobthree and all the other accounts you've created to "add friends" in Farmville. That's how Facebook is harmed by this.

ghshephard 14y ago

After being a full time-500+friend user of Facebook since the days when you required your university account to sign up, I finally got around to deleting my account on Facebook. Moved my close family, including my five year old niece, and my six "actual" friends over to Path (well, five of six. #6 doesn't have a smart phone, ironic that my five year old niece does (her father's old 3GS)) I realized one of the nice things about Path is - not sticky at all. No extended timelines, or history that you typically see. 99% of the time you are interested in the last five or six updates only. What this means, is that moving off of Path will be trivial once the eventual commercialization pollutes what is currently a great user experience. (No Ads, No Distractions) Great for us, not so great for Path, I guess. Oh, and the fact that I spend a grand total of 5 minutes a day on Path (Less time than I've spent writing this post) - is also appreciated.

petitmiam 14y ago
Did you have much trouble convincing your friends to move to Path? I think that's the biggest headache for anyone wanting to move away.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  So - Path has a nice feature that lets you post pictures _through_ to Facebook, so for my friends who love Facebook, they can continue to post to Facebook through path. For my friends who have smart phones, but don't like social network, but like smart phones - straight forward - we finally have a reasonably private place for us to share stuff. I'm not trying to convince more than half a dozen people to move though - so, don't really need the same uptake as Facebook.
  - petitmiam 14y ago
    Sounds interesting, I'll give it a shot.

carerra 14y ago

I would venture to estimate many of the fake account have few friends but many thousands of likes to products and services. These are not users you want to include in your advertising campaign, but inevitably do.

carerra 14y ago

I would venture to estimate many of the fake accounts have few friends but many thousands of likes to products and services. These are not users you want to include in your advertising campaign, but inevitably do.

january14n 14y ago

I think they should labeled those 83 million as "SPAM" users.

tokenadult 14y ago

From the submitted article: "User-misclassified accounts amounted to 2.4% - including personal profiles for businesses or pets" The dog owned by my niece in Taiwan has been on Facebook for more than a year. (I haven't bothered to friend the dog, but I keep up with my niece's news via Facebook.) "Duplicate profiles - belonging to already registered users - made up 4.8% of its membership figure." I have plenty of American friends (mostly married women with children) who use pseudonyms, and plenty of those have more than one Facebook account to distinguish personal friends from work colleagues. "Last month, the BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones set up a fake company called VirtualBagel to investigate allegations of fake 'likes'." The BBC investigation confirms what most of us regular Facebook users know from personal experience. A lot of what looks like user engagement on Facebook is just faking or fooling around, not something on which to build an estimate of future monetization of Facebook. I'm still not seeing how Facebook can do any better than AOL did at increasing monetization without driving down the satisfaction of users.

ph33r 14y ago

A friend of mine has a Facebook account for his dog.... tags pictures of him with the dog, and captions the photos: "This is my human... he picks up my poop hehe" My head hurts when I think that 82,999,999 more of these accounts exist.

moreorless 14y ago

Facebook wishes it "only" has 83 million "fake" users. I used to run a very popular forum and more than 80% of the registered accounts were nothing more than spam or troll accounts. Let's give FB the benefit of the doubt and say that they only have 15%.

rco8786 14y ago

That means they have 700+ million 'real' users.

at-fates-hands 14y ago

I think some of these can be explained as hacked accounts. I've had more than one friend who got their accounts hacked and FB wouldn't do anything to reset their password or give them back control. They just simply created another account and just forgot about the old account.

dangerboysteve 14y ago

I have 2 fake account and a real account. The fakes are used for testing. I believe the 83Million number is understated and that should be at least double. I know of 3 separate individuals that have multiple accounts. One personal and one for business.

Kilimanjaro 14y ago

I'll say this, facebook is dying. But the new king is not G+, no. Demographically speaking, FB users like gossip, while G+ users like quality. Mom will never go to G+ and I will never go to FB. So, there is a need for a new facebook and G+ is not the answer. I dare to say something like pinterest, with a river of short messages and pictures, but highly visual, will replace FB. No ads, no apps, no likes, no stupidity in the name of profits, no privacy whoring. That's the new facebook.

tomjakubowski 14y ago
No ads? Pinterest essentially presents nothing but ads.
- Kilimanjaro 14y ago
  Like pinterest, in the visual sense, but about family, friends and celebrities, not ads. Something that floods me with gossip and pics, people talking about people, like a reddit for the family. I won't use a service like that, like I don't use pinterest, but that is exactly what will take FB's place in the future. My personal digg, shared with family and friends.

epo 14y ago

Facebook have to admit they have fake accounts because it would defy credulity to suggest otherwise. They also have to vastly understate the number otherwise their advertisers would sue or flee in droves. So the only question is to what degree they are lying. I would suggest that from an advertiser's perspective the real number of fake accounts is at least 25%, probably much higher.