The platform’s real user base is variable. The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. According to internal records, social network is having a difficulty estimating the number of active users that may be counted when creating numerous accounts on Facebook, according to the journal. “Duplicate and fake accounts are exceedingly difficult to measure at our scale,” it wrote in an October securities filing, adding that the real numbers “may differ considerably from our estimates.” Facebook provides marketers access to actual people – 2.32 billion of them, a network that exceeds the combined populations of North America, South America, and Africa.
But how many people actually use Facebook?
The answer can be found in part as how many of the accounts are fake. The Silicon Valley corporation describes Facebook fake accounts as profiles that are either intended to violate its rules, such as spammers or fraudsters spoofing others, or are misclassified, such as someone creating a Facebook profile instead of a Facebook page for a business. Duplicates were described by Facebook as “an account that a person keeps in addition to his or her primary account.” RELATED: Facebook Re-brand: What will be the new name of the company
How Fake accounts could harm Facebook’s business?
“We generate most of our business/revenue through advertising accounts,” the business stated in its report. “The loss of advertising, or a drop in spending by advertisers on Facebook, may significantly hurt our company.” According to the publication, the observed ambiguity in user count might have an influence on the trustworthiness of information shared with advertisers.
Takeaway
As a “real identity platform,” Facebook prohibits users from having numerous personal profiles. Users can instead only have one primary account with their true name. According to the memos seen by The Journal, most users create additional identities because they are locked out of their primary accounts or make an error logging in.
