At Least 1.5 Percent of Facebook Accounts Aren’t Real

This is not the sort of thing Face­book prob­a­bly wanted to ever come out in pub­lic.  It’s no doubt been long assumed that a mild per­cent­age of all Face­book accounts are either Spam, hack accounts, and the like, but now that Face­book is a pub­licly traded com­pany, they can’t legally hide this infor­ma­tion anymore.

And now it’s come out, and hurt­ing their already weak stock price and attempts to sell Face­book Adver­tis­ing as a viable option for com­pa­nies becomes a tougher sell when they don’t know if the account they’re micro-targeting is real or not.

In a quar­terly fil­ing with the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion, the social media com­pany said that as many as 83 mil­lion of its accounts are fake.

It also reported that as many as five per­cent of its active users have dupli­cate accounts.

Face­book mem­bers grew to 955 mil­lion this year.

It says 1.5 per­cent of its accounts are likely spam or accounts set up for other mali­cious activ­ity.  The fake accounts are con­cen­trated in devel­op­ing mar­kets, accord­ing to the filing.

It also blames peo­ple who set up accounts for non-human enti­ties, such as pets.

There are “inher­ent chal­lenges” in mea­sur­ing usage,” the social net­work said.

“We are con­tin­u­ally seek­ing to improve our abil­ity to iden­tify dupli­cate or false accounts and esti­mate the total num­ber of such accounts, and such esti­mates may be affected by improve­ments or changes in our method­ol­ogy,” the fil­ing continued.

Why would you set up a Face­book account for your pet?  I love my dog, but I don’t think the world needs to know what he’s out lying in the sun most of the day.

That’s what he has my Face­book account for.

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