Facebook Admits What We All Suspected – 270 Million Accounts are Fake or Duplicate

Around 270 million accounts on Facebook are fake or duplicate, the social media giant has admitted – even as it faces heat over allegedly Russia-backed fake news and advertising on the platform that was meant to meddle in the 2016 US elections.

As Facebook released its third quarter earnings, buried in the fine print of the report were the updated numbers of illegitimate accounts, as first reported by Business Insider.

Out of the 2.1 billion monthly users worldwide, around 2-3% were “user-misclassified and undesirable accounts” in the third quarter of 2017, an increase from the estimate of 1% this July. And another 10% of its accounts are duplicates of real users, an increase from the 6% it estimated in the last quarter results.

This means that up to 13% of its 2.1 billion users – nearly 270 million accounts – are not authentic.

In fact, Facebook has been notorious for tampering with its audience reach data, as well as the reach patterns of its organic posts, in various countries in other ways too.

The reason for the increase in fake or duplicate accounts, said Facebook, was improved tools to identify fake accounts rather than a sudden upsurge in illegitimate users. In the report, Facebook attributed the updates to “a new methodology for duplicate accounts that included improvements to the data signals we rely on”, as per Business Insider.

Meanwhile, as the US investigates Russian interference in the elections, Facebook reportedly plans to tell the Senate judiciary committee that Russian-promoted content on the networking website reached around 126 million Americans during and after the elections. As per Facebook, 120 fake Russian-backed pages created 80,000 posts that reached 29 million Americans directly, but reached a much bigger audience through users following, liking and sharing the posts, says The Guardian.

In fact, the proportion of political interference through social media, particularly Facebook, has grown to the extent that the social networking website cracked down on 30,000 fake accounts before the presidential elections in France and also took down “tens of thousands” of fake accounts before the German elections, both held this year.

In the third quarter earnings report, the company revealed that it recorded a 79% increase in its quarterly profits to $4.7 billion.