More than 83 million Facebook Profiles are Fakes

More than 83 million Facebook Profiles are Fakes

 Facebook has somewhere around 955 million members – the trouble is, not all of them are real.

 

 According to the company’s own filings published last week, around 83 million people on the social network are bogus, either as duplicates of other accounts, accounts made for things other than people, or accounts specifically made to distribute spam. The news comes just after startup “Limited Run” suggested that up to eighty percent of its clicks on Facebook were coming from bots, and another experiment found that blank ads did as well or only slightly worse than other kinds of ads on Facebook.

At the BBC, technology reporter Rory Cellan-Jones set up a fake company called “Virtual Bagel” to investigate fake likes. He found that his company got a huge number of users with doubtful back stories originating from the Middle East and Asia.

It’s all bad news for a social media giant that still relies on advertising for the vast majority of its revenue. The cloud of doubt over the effectiveness of Facebook advertising has been growing in the wake of the company’s first filings, and the stock price has been tanking.

“The loss of advertisers, or reduction in spending by advertisers with Facebook, could seriously harm our business,” says the filing.

A quick look at any given Facebook page makes it clear that the ads are low quality in the current format. Advertisers have less space than a tweet to make their pitch next to photos that can barely convey what product they’re selling. If Facebook wants those ads to continue to be worth the money, it needs massive numbers of impressions, but these numbers cast doubt on whether the impressions are genuine.

Facebook has never been particularly responsive to its user base, and yet membership has continued to grow. Giving up a free service just isn’t worth the hassle. But advertisers are Facebook’s real customer base, and they’ll need more reassurance from Facebook that their money is well spent, or the bubble will burst.