Much popular social media platform, Facebook, has been dealing with a lot of duplicate and fake accounts lately. According to its annual reports, these accounts now have rounded up to a figure of 200 million. Countries like India, Vietnam, and Indonesia top the list! And this data has been graphed in the month of December 2017.
“In the fourth quarter of 2017, we estimated that the duplicate accounts may have represented approximately 10 percent of our worldwide MAUs (Monthly Active Users),” says Facebook in its yearly report. “We believe the percentage of duplicate accounts is meaningfully higher in developing markets such as India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, as compared to more developed ones,” it further added.
The reports of December 2016 shows an increase of 1.86 Billion MAUs out of which 114 million accounts are bogus which implies to around 6 percent of the total MAUs!
Account holders from India, Indonesia and Vietnam have been the major sources of this growth in 2017. Globally, a 14% increase was recorded in the Daily Active Users (DAUs). This accounts for around 1.40 billion in December 2017 compared to the 1.23 billion DAUs recorded in December 2016.
And for your information, there’s a difference between a duplicate and a fake account. A duplicate account is when a person owns another Facebook profile apart from his/ her existing profile. Whereas a Fake account can be classified in two manners: Having personal account for professional purposes or owning a non-human entity account like that of a pet. False accounts are essentially undesirable accounts that do not follow the site’s terms of service or are used for criminal activities.
“The estimates of duplicate and false accounts are based on an internal review of a limited sample of accounts, and we apply significant judgment in making this determination,” the annual report further elaborated.
However, the figures mentioned can differ from the actual number of duplicate and fake accounts as tracking such accounts is not an easy task!
