Facebook Doesn’t Know How Many of Its User Profiles Are Fake

Facebook often boasts about how it has billions of users, but that’s not exactly true with all things having been considered and taken into account. What Facebook is referring to is the fact that it has billions of registered accounts on its platform, but how many of those accounts belong to real life users and how many of them are fake profiles is anyone’s guess because the frequency with which users might try to create multiple accounts is startlingly high.

A presentation that the company showed internally has indicated that the number of fake profiles or users with multiple profiles might be higher than initially expected. This comes from an analysis of 5,000 new accounts that were created which revealed that anywhere from 32% to 56% of these accounts were created by users who already had a profile on the platform and wanted a separate one for a wide range of reasons including privacy as well as potentially malicious reasons too.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that this is a real problem for Facebook because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up making it difficult for advertisers to find out how many unique impressions their ads received. Facebook has cracked down on people with multiple accounts in the past, but the fact that the problem still persists indicates that those efforts were not entirely successful.

This problem is getting a lot worse these days, and Facebook needs to figure out a way to deal with it as quickly as possible. The social media platform is facing numerous obstacles these days, and dealing with this on top of everything else is likely not going to make things any easier for the platform as time goes by.