Last week, during its first quarterly earnings report as a public company, Facebook revealed it had reached 955 million monthly active users and 543 million monthly active mobile users. As expected, the public company also said that they loose USD 157 million.
Facebook estimates 8.7 percent, or 83.09 million accounts are fake accounts. People with multiple Facebook accounts, profiles for pets, “zombie blondes” are some examples of these fake users. “A huge jump, both in raw numbers and as a percentage from Facebook’s last estimate,” notes CNet’s Emil Protlanski. “Back in March, Facebook said 5 to 6 percent of accounts are false or duplicate.”
Does this mean that a huge amount of fake accounts were created over the last five months?
Not really. As it is required of a public company, Facebook is simply being more transparent when it comes to specifying which false accounts it is tracking. Before it only listed duplicate and false users, and now Facebook quantified them: duplicate accounts (4.8 percent), user-misclassified accounts (2.4 percent), and undesirable accounts (1.5 percent).
Facebook explained they believe that the number of “duplicate or false” accounts is “meaningfully lower in developed markets such as the United States or Australia and higher in developing markets such as Indonesia and Turkey.” They note too that their numbers might not be totally accurate.
That’s a lot of imaginary friends! And you, what’s about your friends? Are they all true?
Image source: http://www.hyphenet.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/facebook-real-vs-fake.png http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m85mb57kvS1qclfey.jpg
