Watch Out Your Friend is Fake or Real: Facebook Announced 83 Million Accounts Are Fake
The large number of fake accounts on Facebook. Roughly the facebook fake accounts size equal to Egypt’s population and larger than most of the world’s countries, the Facebook company announced last week.
Facebook said it had 955 million active monthly users as of June 30. Facebook also find a large number of fake accounts. The company estimates that as many as 8.7 percent of those accounts, or a tad over 83 million, are fake.
Facebook further breaks these accounts into what it calls “duplicate” accounts and “false” accounts. Duplicate accounts are the ones that users maintain in addition to their principal account. False accounts are further categorised into two – user-misclassified accounts and undesirable accounts.
User-misclassified accounts are ones where users have created personal profiles for a business, organisation, or non-human entity such as a pet. These entities are allowed to exist on Facebook, but as a Page, not as individual accounts. Undesirable accounts, on the other hand, are ones that Facebook believes “are intended to be used for purposes that violate our terms of service, such as spamming”.
Facebook says that a total of 8.7% — or 83 million — accounts on the network are bogus. 4.8% are duplicate accounts, 2.4% are user-misclassified accounts and 1.5% are “undesirable” accounts, are spam.
The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company posted a loss of $157 million, or 8 cents per share in the April-June period, mainly due to compensation expenses it incurred when it paid $1.3 billion in restricted stock and related taxes for employees as part of the IPO.
The figure is a bit higher than the company’s previous estimates. In a March filing, Facebook claimed about 5% to 6% of its accounts — or 40.3 million to 50.7 million — were fake. The company also says it bans at least 20,000 accounts daily and estimates about 600,000 accounts per day are compromised.
Taking the latest figures into account, Facebook’s latest claim of 955 million active users would be downgraded to 872 million.
The results come two months after Facebook’s stock flopped on its first trading day, on May 18. The day began with glitches with the Nasdaq stock market that delayed trading by half an hour. It didn’t get much better from there. Despite months of hoopla that had investors thinking it would soar, the stock closed just 23 cents above its $38 IPO price. It has not reached that level since.
With inputs from AP
