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Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

bbc.com

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Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#51

Post by unreal37 »

lusr wrote: post #15
swombat wrote: post #4

Worth noting that not all these "fakes" are bad, or even inactive or less active. For example, most performers on the Burlesque scene have accounts specifically for their Burlesque personas, with names like "Kitty Cupcake" or "Tabitha Taboo" and the like. These are obviously not their real names, but a consequence of the fact that Burlesque performers don't want the offline attention on their personal or professional…

My ex-girlfriend used a second Facebook profile to earn rewards in the *ville games (or something, I have no idea how those games work). Truly fake secondary accounts like that are probably quite common given the popularity of those games. All of this just demonstrates that using "monthly active users" as a metric is meaningless and Facebook need better and more well thought out metrics.

This is very common on the Zynga *ville game scene. There are massive rewards for sharing (ie. spamming) your friends and having them click links. So it's better to spam yourself with two or more fake accounts to get those rewards.

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#52

Post by unreal37 »

xSwag wrote: post #3

There are a lot of people offering 1000 Facebook page likes for just $5 on websites like Fiverr. I've seen profiles that have had no status updates but has 5k pages liked. There is a LOT of social media spam on Facebook

I bet Facebook has already identified that as "undesirables".

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#53

Post by ryanmolden »

jps359 wrote: post #29
lusr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their mobile iOS application is absolutely the worst application I have ever used on iOS. It just doesn't work far too often (it took 2 months for notifications to randomly start working on my new iPhone 4S, but activating them can't load the new content half the time or just sits there loading forever; I have no network issues with any other iOS applications) and irritates me too much (e.g. I keep getting stories fr…

This is my primary gripe with facebook. You'd think that they'd be able to develop a decent mobile app, being as large as it is. The google+ app works way way way better. So smooth and everything loads quickly as it should. Hell, even the tumblr app I use works better than the facebook one.

The cynic in me assumes since they have no mobile monetization story that I have seen their desire to spend time on mobile clients is low. I find some humor in a firm that trots out how they only hire the best of the best of the best can't field an even half-way decent mobile app.

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#54

Post by unreal37 »

I think calling them "fake" users is incorrect and misleading. The majority, as the article states, are real people with two or more accounts.

Two accounts represents an easy way to separate your personal and professional lives. Instead of fretting over the privacy settings of each picture, setting up lists, using the complicated and changing processes for managing privacy on FB, the "easy" way is to create two separate personas. And there is nothing wrong with this.

Performers needed to do this, since Facebook "Pages" and "subscribing without friending" are relatively new. And plenty of people who feel the need to be Facebook friends with people from work who don't want them seeing their personal lives and high school photos. And people hiding from ex-husbands and stalkers and other privacy-aware people who want to be on FB, publically findable, but keep a lot of stuff truly hidden.

There are a lot of people who value their privacy and doesn't provide real birthdays (Jan 1 1900), real pictures, real interests and likes, announce who their relatives are, and relationship statuses... are they fake?

The system has to account for people who need two accounts or incomplete accounts. I don't see how this harms Facebook in any way, or why the BBC needs to portray this as if there's a massive problem.

Spam accounts and bots... that's another thing entirely.

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#55

Post by ghshephard »

After being a full time-500+friend user of Facebook since the days when you required your university account to sign up, I finally got around to deleting my account on Facebook. Moved my close family, including my five year old niece, and my six "actual" friends over to Path (well, five of six. #6 doesn't have a smart phone, ironic that my five year old niece does (her father's old 3GS))

I realized one of the nice things about Path is - not sticky at all. No extended timelines, or history that you typically see. 99% of the time you are interested in the last five or six updates only. What this means, is that moving off of Path will be trivial once the eventual commercialization pollutes what is currently a great user experience. (No Ads, No Distractions)

Great for us, not so great for Path, I guess.

Oh, and the fact that I spend a grand total of 5 minutes a day on Path (Less time than I've spent writing this post) - is also appreciated.

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#56

Post by ghshephard »

veyron wrote: post #11
swombat wrote: post #4

Worth noting that not all these "fakes" are bad, or even inactive or less active. For example, most performers on the Burlesque scene have accounts specifically for their Burlesque personas, with names like "Kitty Cupcake" or "Tabitha Taboo" and the like. These are obviously not their real names, but a consequence of the fact that Burlesque performers don't want the offline attention on their personal or professional…

"an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account." The problem there is that a person trying hard to keep personas separate can do so without Facebook being able to track (I assume they have to be more specific than just matching by IP address).

Re: Matching IP address - given the prevalence of NAT, in which several thousand users will be associated with a single IP address - you can't rely on that.

Cookies, on the other hand, or, browser-fingerprint-matching, probably can be used to identify these shill accounts. I wonder if Facebook knows how many of it's accounts are fake, or if they actively avoid looking into that information.

Re: Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

#57

Post by zipdog »

conradfr wrote: post #43
freehunter wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did an experiment a few years ago where I set up a profile for someone who supposedly went to my university. His pictures were pulled from the profile of a male model, the rest was all made up. I went through every profile I could get and sent friend requests. I actually hit the 5000 friends limit. Usually I would send a message saying "hey we met at X party last night!" if I could find that information on their pu…

Notbad.jpg The funny thing is that I NEVER asked anyone from my fish account and he now has friends from all over the world, while his name is "My fish Ploup" in French. About your fake account and its birthday wishes, An experiment could be to put a erroneous birthday date. I guess that day you can get a lot of wishes, even from close friends. We are just lazy I guess.

I tried that experiment, and the first couple of years it was about 50/50, but most recently almost everyone who posted did so on the FB birthday date. I think theyv'e come to rely on the Facebook reminders.

It was also interesting to see the cognitive dissonance from some posts: "I'm pretty sure it was your birthday next week, but Facebook says its this week, so Happy Birthday".

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