Facebook’s latest quarterly SEC Filing has been posted online. That may sound like a boring proposition, but a new freelance writer at CNET actually read it and discovered that a notable portion of Facebook’s 955 million users aren’t, well… real people. 8.7 percent, or 83 million of the social network’s monthly active users are fake or mislabeled accounts, it estimates.
Here’s the breakdown of Facebook’s users:
- 4.8 percent (46 million) of active users are duplicate accounts
- 2.4 percent (23 million) are misclassified, like a family dog or a business posing as a person
- 1.5 percent (14 million) are spammers and other bad people
- 57 percent (543 million) users accessed Facebook from a mobile device in June
When Facebook first filed for its Initial Public Offering a few months ago, it estimated that the number of fake accounts stood at only around 6 percent, but must have developed more precise algorithms (or gotten more honest) since. Some gaming and forgeries are to be expected, but 10 percent does sound like a high number of fake accounts.
We’ve seen an uptick in updates from Pages filtering into our newsfeed, but haven’t noticed a huge spam or duplicate account problem. What do you think? Have fake accounts been contacting you lately?
I think Facebook is a little behind, people realized that two plus years ago
hahah
Don’t forget that Facebook has its own CDN and datacenter
Jimmy, they are placing more servers in the artic (I’m not kidding). And they’ve moved some core sections from PHP to C.
so about a billion FB accounts exist (954million)… how huge FB’s server farm would it be to hold such accounts and the 24/7 accumulation of comments, images, games & other applications on earth??
facebook i like it is my son
There wouldn’t be so many duplicates if it wasn’t for their ridiculous cap on number of friends.
How many are from pets with duplicate, mislabeled spamming businesses?
What?!? You mean that the Prince of Nigeria who wanted to be friends with me is not real?
I’ve gotten the occasional friend request from obviously fake accounts, but it’s super rare.
Most ‘fake accounts’ I know of are people who are just trying to get around their bosses finding their private accounts. And who can blame them?
However, the pet facebook account needs to die a painful death. I love my cat, don’t get me wrong. But she isn’t getting a facebook page, because obvious.
That’s a lot of fake accounts, but I’d say it’s probably the lowest percentage out of any other the other major, personal, social networks
I wasn’t contacted by any fake accounts, but I have like 10 of them. And there are networks of hundreds and thousands of accounts each.. many of them with flowers at profile pictures :)