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You’ll often hear the statistic that if Facebook were a country, it would have the third biggest population in the world. Now it turns out that only 14 countries have more people than Facebook has fake accounts.
The revelation comes in Facebook’s latest regulatory filing. Since listing on stock exchanges, the company is required to tell stockholders about any mitigating factors to the measures of its success. Facebook has decided that the gap between the official number of accounts and the actual number of human users is significant enough to list here.
The shortfall is made up of three main categories:
4.8 percent of accounts (around 45.84 million) are believed to be duplicates where people have breached the site’s conditions by having two personal pages.
2.4 percent of accounts (around 22.92 million) are miscategorized, meaning that they are not for a human user and instead are for an organization, product or even a pet.
1.5 percent of accounts are dubbed “undesirable”, meaning they are used primarily for spam and similar purposes, rather than by a person wanting to represent themselves in a social network.
Facebook notes that these are only estimates, extrapolated from a limited sample. It also points out that calculating their figures involves a great deal of judgment in identifying a bogus account.
The company found there was a significant difference in the distribution of bogus accounts, with comparatively fewer in developed countries and comparatively more in developing markets. That backs a BBC investigation earlier this year that found clearly bogus accounts were far more prevalent in Egypt and the Philippines.
The real problem isn’t so much Facebook boasting about the size of its membership, but rather the threat of advertisers paying to get a certain number of clicks or “Likes” from users, only to discover a high proportion of them are from bogus accounts and thus won’t ever lead to sales.
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