The decision-makers over at Facebook were likely pretty pleased with themselves on Wednesday night when their third-quarter earnings report was made public. The social media behemoth continues to enjoy an ever-increasing user base and continually-rising profits, with the company revealing a staggering 79% increase in quarterly profits which brings the figure for Q3 up to a more-than-healthy total of $4.7bn (£3.6bn).
Hidden within the small sprint however were a couple of
figures of which Facebook are decidedly less proud, as it has emerged that the
platform is littered with far more fake and duplicate accounts than previously
stated with up to 270 million accounts on the social network deemed to be illegitimate
in one form or another. The platforms number of fake accounts, which includes “user-misclassified
and undesirable accounts”, tripled in relation to their July estimates, leaping
from 1% to 3% in the time since. Similarly the number of duplicate accounts on
the network rose from 6% to 10%, bringing the total number of illegitimate accounts
on the platform up to nearly 270 million, which equates to roughly 13% of
Facebook’s 2.1bn monthly users.
According to Facebook however this increase in the number of
illegitimate accounts reportedly still active on the site is not due to an
actual rise in fake or duplicate users; rather the increase is a result of “a
new methodology for duplicate accounts that included improvements to the data
signals we rely on.” Basically what they are saying is that the number of said
undesirable accounts has not in fact increased - Facebook have just got better
at identifying them.
The revelation may nonetheless have a negative impact upon
the company’s perceived integrity, particularly in the wake of ongoing investigations
into Russian election meddling via the use of advertising on their platform, and
the recent questions raised regarding their advertising figures in which they claimed
to be able to reach more people than actually exist within a given demographic,
at least according to official census data.
There are plans in the pipeline intended to help deal with these issues however, as a spokesperson for Facebook told Business Insider that the same improved methodology updates which revealed the apparent uptick in illegitimate accounts will also be used in an effort to improve the accuracy of Facebook’s tools for advertisers; this improved accuracy should specifically affect Facebook’s estimates for the number of real people it can reach with an advertiser’s campaign, the source said.
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