Facebook: 83 million IMPOSTERS stalk our network Facebook is still racking up false accounts even as it continues to try and flush out imposters on the dominant social network, which is seeing its value close to being halved on Wall Street. The Mark Zuckerberg-run company disclosed during its first public quarterly earnings report last week that it now has 955 million …
I think I've got two Facebook accounts - I set one up in my real name when I needed to get in touch with someone who didn't really know how to use anything else but before that I started one in a made-up name to see what the site was like.
Can't remember what it was though.
I wonder how typical that is?
Duplicates are a massive problem and definitely account for a higher percentage than they are letting on. Accounts for pets is just the tip of the iceberg, but they won't want to let on as it will tank the share price even more.
Accounts in celebrities names
Accounts in pets names
Accounts for cheating on partners
Accounts for games so you can give your main account bonuses faster
Accounts for businesses who don't like the standard pages facebook let you create
Accounts for idiots who have locked themselves out of their original account
I only use the site to keep in touch with family and friends who are far afield, but more and more obviously fake or duplicate accounts keep cropping up on people you may know. More than actual human accounts. It's a massive problem it's got to be in the 30 to 40% mark.
Also I wonder how they classify 'closed accounts' because when you close it you can log in four months later and everything is there as if you never left it, so are they classing those accounts in their total user base?
> More than actual human accounts. .. it's got to be in the 30 to 40% mark.
So what else is there (other than "actual humans" and "fakes") if fakes are more than humans but less than 50%?
As I said it's more fake than actual human accounts on the people you may know part of facebookt. On people you may know it's about 80% fake accounts.
As for the site in general and it's accounts I estimate it will be about 30/40%
I used to have two Facebook accounts, one real and one fake. The Facebook nazi's decided my real one was fake, deactivated it, and demanded I authenticate it with documentation if I wanted it reactivated. My response was "screw you", and so if and when I ever "need" to log into Facebook, I use the fake account.
A while back, in my workplace, we had a discussion of this and what was surprising was how many people, like me, had their real Facebook accounts flagged as fakes, and like me, chose to not provide Facebook with proof they were who they claimed they were, and instead just keep using their fake account.
So despite Facebooks admission that almost 10% of Facebook accounts are fakes, the real percentage has got to be higher. Much higher.
I spoke with a colleague at lunch time who explained to me that she created an account specially for her cat......
She and her friends have cat pages on which the "cats" exchange information and images "of other cats". Believe it or not my colleague is university educated, hardworking and methodical. She is definately not the kind of person that I would have imagined creating such a page.
My colleagues and her friends also have their own personal pages.
I wonder how many other Cat / Dogs / Animal pages exist I presume there are equal amounts of pages for Perverts, Fetichistes, Trees, Badgers, Telephones and endless amounts of useless crap.
83 Million false accounts probably doesn't reach anywhere beyond 50 % of the crap / false / useless accounts.
I do not have a FB account so i can't verify the validity of anything FB related, I'll leave that up to the numpties that bought shares.
Slightly off topic, but a decade or so back, when banks and credit card companies were prolific generators of "your application will be instantly approved" mailings, a friend of mine obtained a credit card in the name of her cat. The card was is the name of "Eric De Catt" or something like that (the cats name being Eric), and she used it for all the food and vets bills and related stuff. Totally makes a mockery of security checks, credit references, money laundering regs and all that sh*t. No doubt FB will now start asking for proof of identity for cat and pet accounts.....
And who really cares about FB and how many dud accounts they have? The companies whole ethos seems very dubious, and I feel sorry for the kids of today who post their entire life on there. It will all come back to haunt them sometime.
Several of my friends choose to post a large number of photos of their cats on Facebook. Some people enjoyed these endearing pictures, whereas others expressed their ire at the feline spam clogging their what-people-are-having-for-dinner feeds. Their rather neat solution was to set up separate accounts for their cats and have those accounts befriend only those people who wanted to see inordinate numbers of cat photos.
In fact I rather wish that some of my other friends would adopt the same approach for the large number of photos of their children.
(Yeah, I know that the correct solution, technically, would have been to establish a group, but I guess most users don't know how to do that whereas they do know how to set up an account...)
This post has been deleted by its author
Nothing against your post, but those it really matter how many cats, dogs and parrots have accounts and how many are false, duplicate and so on. who cares how many similar "persons" have an hotmail or gmail account.
The problem seems to be that Facebook for such a long time tried to speak about how many persons used Facebook. I have a feeling that sooner or later intelligent people give up, I never started, Does not prove me intelligent, however.
..for marketing reasons.
Then Facebook starting obliging all users to be certified thru unique SMS numbers.. which is plain illegal and crazy.. since when Facebook turned into FBI ?
And why no one is stopping them? Obviously they are paying big bucks to politicians and cops to let them do whatever they want like nazis do.
Facebook only deserves to go bankrupt. It's a disgrace to the world and a problem for democracy.
To be fair, it's optional to use Facebook; it's not a necessary public service or a mandatory registration system. So if FB want to have stupid rules, then they can, and the remedy to those who don't like it is simply not to use it... which I wish a lot more people would do, thus hastening FB's demise.
Although admittedly I would then have to find another way of ascertaining what time my friends awake and what form of meteorological activity they are experiencing.
it's optional to use Facebook;
It's still optional to use Facebook; at least one member of the Cabinet here has suggested integrating DigiD logins (just about anything related to logging in to some government web service) with Farcebook. I'm not sure if her major intestine then lept up and throttled her brain a bit, causing her to quickly add that it would be an alternate authentication method, but it's clearly not beyond the lack of thinking of some minister to come up with this crap.
And once it's in place, it'd be easy enough to make it compulsory, so that they can drop the normal login service "because so few people use that anymore".
I created a Farcebook page to promote my business.
I then created an personal account to associate with that business.
I then created several other accounts just to work out how the Farcebook privacy controls work and who could see what.
If Farcebook close all my accounts, I will sleep soundly in the comfortable knowledge that I have lost absolutely nothing.
We need a shrug icon.
I know a lot of Second Life residents had a Facebook account for their avatar as an extension to their Second Life presence. Linden Lab even semi-encouraged it inasmuch as you can link your Second Life profile to a Facebook account.
Apparently Facebook had a massive cull on this last year and removed thousands of such accounts.
I also have friends who have an 'online persona' type Facebook account that they are less picky about who friends along with a 'proper' account that only actual friends are invited to.
So, as others have said, alt accounts are more prevalent than Facebook think.
(Sharp intake of breath)
Nobody owns a cat. Cats just tolerate the presence of humans that provide food.
Notice how quickly the purring and rubbing against your legs stops when the minced, unsuccessful racehorse in jelly hits the bowl.
One day we will develop opposable thumbs and master the tin opener...
"One day we will develop opposable thumbs and master the tin opener..."
From the point of view of Facebook customers, the advertisers, what matters is whether their ads are shown to people who might care for them.
So for example, a cat food company wants their ads in cat's pages, why should they care if the account doesn't really belong to a real cat?
Similar reasons for wearing clothes, using envelopes, or drawing the curtains prior to conjugal activities.
That's why I have 2 FB accounts. It's why mobile phone OS developers are developing virtual machines. I already had a social account, and that's not under my real name, face or birthdate for privacy reasons. And why would I want bosses, customers, colleagues and staff having visibility of my social life ?
For anyone who wants website cookie tracking split into seperate compartments, use virtual machines. I never overlap compartmentalised personalities onto the same machine.
This post has been deleted by its author
I suppose my Facebook account is technically fake as it's not in my "real" name, but uses the pseudonym I use in my political cartoons, protest videos, blog posts, and last but not least, comments on El Reg.
However, I run it as if it were a "real" account: I "friend" only people I actually know or work with in person -- mostly progressive activist types -- and generally keep my privacy settings locked down tighter than a prima donna's corset. I use it primarily to promote and share my political cartoon work, so I also try to treat it as if it were a "professional" account -- so almost all the stuff in my feed is activism/news related, no bullshit about what people are having for lunch, none of that crap.
Still, ironically, because it's under an assumed name with a constructed persona, it's "fake". I've considered setting up a separate account in my "real" name as my "straight" professional account, for posting links to my commercial design portfolio and my resume and such, and perhaps linking it to my LinkedIn account (jeezus, talk about useless; don't even get me started). I haven't bothered with it because I already own a domain name based on my "real" name, complete with an email address and Web site that potential clients can go to, and I just can't see where having a Facebook account in my "real" name would add any value to my "straight" professional Web presence. Based on everything I see going down vis-a-vis Facebook, it seems better for my career if my "real" self just stayed the hell away.
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
I have a friend who died last April and his account is still on Facebook. They never check the obits. I'm sure there are at least 50 million dead people on facebook too. If you really want to check out a social network with false accounts, check out Second Life. I believe about 90% of the customers there have at least 2 accounts, and I personally know about 10 people that have over 25 accounts. It's not uncommon at all for people to create alternate identities. It gives them a chance to take a break from some of the jerks they have to deal with on their other account (main account).
There's something so senile about Facebook and its 'likes' that the very notion of signing up to it baffles me. I don't have in mind any image of a massively effective ad machine that forensically targets economically attractive demographics, rather a group of old -- very, very, very old -- care home residents sitting on a semi-circle of chairs as Matron communicates slooowly in child-speak: 'Everyone nod who LIKES semolina for their dinner' / 'You all LIKE it?' / 'Aw, I LIKE semolina too. Altogether now: we're H A P P Y . . .'
That said, those senile I LIKErs are cerebrally a damn sight more intelligent than the morons and the chancers who believed FB was anything other than just one more hula hoop craze.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
