Facebook have 275 Million Fake Accounts Globally- Annual Reports

The latest annual report of social networking site says that “Facebook has approximately 275 million duplicate accounts out of its 2.50 billion monthly active users as on Dec. 31, 2019”. It also says “As of Dec. 31, 2019, we had 2.50 billion monthly active users- an increase of 8 percent from Dec. 31, 2018. Users in India, Indonesia and the Philippines represented key sources of growth in 2019, relative to the same period in 2018. In the fourth quarter of 2019,

we estimated that duplicate accounts may have represented approximately 11 percent of our worldwide monthly active users. We believe the percentage of duplicate accounts is meaningfully higher in developing markets such as the Philippines and Vietnam, as compared to more developed markets”. According to Facebook, a duplicate account is one that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account.

Facebook has divided ‘False’ accounts into two categories, user-misclassified and violating accounts. User-misclassified accounts are the alternate accounts users create like personal profiles for a business, organisation or a non-human entity as a pet. Violating accounts which represent user profiles that the site determines are intended to be used for purposes that violate Facebook’s terms of service, such as spamming.

“The estimates of duplicate and false accounts are based on an internal review of a limited sample of accounts and we apply significant judgement in making this determination,” it explained. It further said, “Duplicate and false accounts are very difficult to measure at the scale and it is possible that the actual number of duplicate and false accounts may vary significantly from the estimates.”

The networking site said in the fourth quarter of 2019, it is estimated that false accounts may have represented approximately 5 percent of its worldwide MAUs. Worldwide Daily Active Users increased 9 percent to 1.66 billion on an average during December 2019 from 1.52 billion during December 2018.