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Facebook Estimates Around 10% of Accounts Are Fake
An anonymous reader writes "Last week, during its fourth-quarter earnings report, Facebook revealed it had 1.23 billion monthly active users, 757 million daily active users, 945 million monthly active mobile users, and 556 million daily active mobile users. In its 10-K filing published on the weekend, the company estimated that in 2013, between 5.5 percent and 11.2 percent of these users were fake."
Another anonymous reader sent in a link to a recent interview where Mark Zuckerberg appears more pragmatic in his opinions about forcing real identities online: "Former Facebook employees say identity and anonymity have always been topics of heated debate in the company. Now Zuckerberg seems eager to relax his old orthodoxies. 'I don’t know if the balance has swung too far, but I definitely think we’re at the point where we don’t need to keep on only doing real identity things,' he says. 'If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden.'"
What's a fake account? I have a regular one, for everyone, then I have one for competitions and the like, where you have to `like` something to enter. Clearly I'm not going to do this on my normal account because it'll spam all my contacts and I'll look like a twat. What do they expect you to do? But it's not "fake" - it's got my name on it (sort of). I do the same for Twitter, but I don't recall having to pretend that my second (or my first, come to that) Twitter account was "mine".
If I put up a Facebook page for my cat, is that considered a fake account? No fake identities have been used, though perhaps the T&S require all users to be human.
What about people who have two FB profiles - eg one filled with gaming apps and all the crap that comes along with it, and the other for socialising?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
My wife's account with her real name closed arbitrarily by facebook together with her somewhat popular pages and groups. Reason: fake account. She scanned and sent her id and everything. Only response from facebook says this decision is final and cannot be reversed. So I am saying, fuck your policies Mark.