When 83 million are not real!

Last week, Facebook announced a set of interesting statistics, which piqued the interest of users as well as those with business interest in the company. The most important number of course, was that the user count is crawling steadily towards one billion. Zuckerberg declared that as of June end, the company had 955 million people coming into his website.

But they’re not really ‘real people’. Facebook estimates that as many as 8.7 per cent of accounts, which comes to about 83 million logins, are fake.

That could very well mean Natasha, the digital apple of your eye, is not real. This is your Matrix moment.

Facebook further categorised fake accounts into two types — ‘duplicate’ accounts and ‘false’ accounts. Duplicate accounts are the ones that users maintain in addition to their principal account. False accounts are further categorised into two — undesirable accounts and usermisclassified accounts.

Undesirable accounts, in Facebook’s opinion, are those that violate their terms of service. This includes activities such as spamming, imperson- ation and fraud for monetary gain. User-misclassified accounts, on the other hand, are ones where users have created personal profiles for a business or for non-human entity such as a pet and animals. While these entities are allowed to exist, the company recommends them to be used as a Page, and not as individual accounts.

Verifying the authenticity of users has been a long-standing fight for social networking sites, and these data just go on to show the existence, or rather, the prevalence of such false accounts.

Putting the categories of fake accounts into numbers, Facebook’s statistics show that around 46 million accounts are duplicate, while the number of undesirable and user-misclassified accounts stand at 14 million and 23 million respectively, a grand total of 83 million fake accounts.

And in the event that you had actually started falling in love with that guy or girl who was actually a fake account, our heart goes out to you!