Fake social media mess with figures

For Twitter and Facebook, fake and inactive accounts are the enemy within. Their presence undercuts the bold claims social networks make to reach and influence billions. Advertisers and investors know swathes of the prime real estate promised by user data are uninhabited badlands.

Yet cleaning up platforms is proving difficult. Twitter’s recent decision to delete accounts that have not been logged into for six months sounded like a neat bit of housecleaning until users complained about losing accounts created by loved ones who had died. That illustrated the paradox Facebook’s boss Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey of Twitter are wrestling with. It is unclear who user accounts really belong to. Some represent pets, different aspects of a person’s identity or the deceased.

Facebook has a big problem with fake accounts; its answer is to block as many as possible and then come up with a rough estimate of those it cannot identify. Instead of a lower figure for monthly active users it suggests about 16% of the 2.45-billion may be duplicates or false.

User count tweaks have come just as user growth has slowed in lucrative home markets. This does not bode well for revenue growth. US and Canadian users generated nearly half of Facebook’s total revenue in the last quarter. At Twitter, the US accounted for more than half.

Twitter has already opted to get rid of its monthly active user figure after the number nosedived following a crackdown on bots. Instead it reports a “monetisable” daily active figure. This is the number of people it says come into contact with Twitter advertising. It means Twitter users can no longer be compared directly with a rival.

Expect rivals to come up with their own unique user measurements. As bespoke “management performance measures” show in accounting, this will deepen rather than dispel mistrust. /London, November 29

© The Financial Times 2019