
Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users - iProject
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19093078
======
jgroome
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.

~~~
joshuahedlund
I've had a similar experience and similar thoughts. I'm a strong believer in
free markets, etc, but sometimes I don't understand the unending need for
growth (i.e. why is it considered a bad thing that Facebook is so large that
it doesn't have much room for growth?) If you're large and profitable, what's
wrong with that? It often seems like the relentless pursuit for growth leads
to short-term decisions to increase profits that have long-term consequences
of reduced customer satisfaction and thus lost profits.

~~~
caffeine5150
I think its a fundamental flaw of the public company ecosystem. Management is
driven to have a very short-term, myopic view of shareholder value (i.e. stock
price quarter to quarter). This was made much worse by the rise in profile of
analysts in the late 90's tech boom with increased focus on short term
earnings guidance. Perhaps eventually Zuckerberg will be replaced by a more
market-savvy CEO. Also being public will force a giant set of obligations and
priorities that has nothing to do with their offerings (shareholder proxies,
disclosure, class action derivative suits, SOX compliance, investor relations)
and will suck huge resources.

Being public will make FB a poorer company and service.

As a side note, I love how reporters of newly public companies quote risk
factors from a 10-k and present them as some significant revelation of a
skeleton in the closet. Risk factors are required disclosure and attorneys
stuff them with horrible sounding proclamations that often are really just
stating the obvious when you really read them. They are cheap insurance for
the public company - not sure anyone declines to buy a stock based on risk
factors but the company can say "I told you" in the event of certain
shareholder suits.

~~~
niels_olson
I'm reminding of a picture of a board meeting at NeXT, and I vaguely recall
Warren Buffet being mentioned, as either on the board, or giving Jobs advise.
And one of Buffet's stories about getting turned onto stock trading by a guy
at another firm telling him that the market in the short term is a voting
machine, but in the long term, it's a weighing machine. You want to guess the
right weight.

Here's the picture

[http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-
ash4/305285_1015047964...](http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-
ash4/305285_10150479643329199_585383101_n.jpg)

------
swombat
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.

~~~
lusr
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.

~~~
tatsuke95
This is a huge problem I've harped on before, that will get worse in the
future. We've all seen Zynga get buried the past few weeks; what happens when
large flows of people stop playing these games? It's much harder for the
people _still playing_ to achieve some of the "Ask 10 friends!" objectives
that are so prevalent.

How is that solved? By making more fake accounts.

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

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

------
ghshephard
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
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
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
Sounds interesting, I'll give it a shot.

------
jaredstenquist
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
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.

------
conradfr
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
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
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
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
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.

------
bmunro
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
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.

------
unreal37
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
> _"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.

~~~
Spooky23
They need to accept that there is some ambiguity.

I subscribe to the local newspaper in my hometown, which is 500 miles away.
Should the guy buying ads selling cords of firewood be pissed off because my
subscription is not the norm? (a local resident in this case)

~~~
tatsuke95
You say "they" like this is some outside entity. It isn't. It's me, and others
on these forums. And I _can't_ really accept ambiguity.

If Facebook tells me I'm reaching 1,000,000 people, I better be reaching
1,000,000 people. If that number is really 930,000, and Facebook knows that
the number is 930,000, they better be damn sure to tell me so I can calculate
the correct ad-spend. As an advertiser, this figure shouldn't be ambiguous.
That's kind of ridiculous.

But Facebook is in a catch-22: if they _do_ tell me that figure, it's going to
result in lower spends (and thus lower revenues) because their value comes
from the massive audience. Remember, this started as "There is no fake account
problem". Now it's, "Almost 10% of our accounts are fake". How big is the
problem?

~~~
Spooky23
If you have an expectation that there will be little or no variance in a
population of 1,000,000 people your expectations are not realistic. If you
bought a billboard, would you get angry if a car drove past with a sleeping
passenger?

Ambiguity is a given -- is Facebook defrauding you if I say I live in
Manhattan, but for 3 months I'm at my summer home in Lake George, NY, 200
miles away? You probably wouldn't be happy if you were a summer venue in
Manhattan paying to reach people like me.

That isn't fraud. As an advertiser, you need to do your own homework and
adjust the relative effectiveness of Facebook vs. other mediums.

~~~
tatsuke95
> _"If you bought a billboard, would you get angry if a car drove past with a
> sleeping passenger?"_

I can calculate, with precision, the traffic that drives by that sign every
day.

> _"As an advertiser, you need to do your own homework and adjust the relative
> effectiveness of Facebook vs. other mediums."_

Yeah, I do my homework and decide that I'm not going to advertise with
Facebook anymore, because I can't determine whether my ads are reaching the
audience that I've balanced my spend around. _That's what is happening._ Right
now.

You initially stated: _"I don't see how this harms Facebook in any way"_. I'm
explainly how Facebook is affected. Yes, I agree that advertisers will have to
compensate. They are. But returns will be squeezed and that compensation will
be _downward_. That hurts Facebook.

------
xSwag
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
I bet Facebook has already identified that as "undesirables".

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

------
veyron
Even the financial people are questioning FB numbers:

[http://seekingalpha.com/article/773061-facebook-cannot-
survi...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/773061-facebook-cannot-survive-on-
mobile-despite-others-best-wishes)

------
tokenadult
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.

------
mootothemax
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!

------
Jgrubb
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
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".

------
janlukacs
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...

------
Kilimanjaro
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
No ads? Pinterest essentially presents nothing _but_ ads.

~~~
Kilimanjaro
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.

------
zizee
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
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
The spam followers I pick up seem to target lists of “followers of X”, where X
is marginally topical to their spam.

------
epo
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.

------
at-fates-hands
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.

------
moreorless
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%.

------
oron
on <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.

------
dangerboysteve
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.

------
ph33r
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.

------
ck2
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
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
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.

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

~~~
tatsuke95
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
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
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.

------
january14n
I think they should labeled those 83 million as "SPAM" users.

------
rco8786
That means they have 700+ million 'real' users.

