According to its public filings, Facebook admits that as much as 84 million of its users are fake accounts. Since Facebook claims that it has around 955 million active users, this is almost 10% of the users based, and most likely much more considering that many accounts are created once and never used. This could mean that a large percentage of the people online at one time aren’t even real? Then who really is clicking on all those ads?
The reasons given for fake users include duplicate accounts, business accounts, and of course, loads and loads of spammers and scammers. Oh, and yes, weird older guys who get off pretending to be women on our facebook group.
We found some interesting statistics of who are fake users. Despite what we may think, they are not all trolls from the affiliate industry, although that sometimes seems to be the case.
According to ZDNET:
How do you spot a fake Facebook user? People have many strategies, including looking at the content on their Wall, checking their mutual friends, and/or just scanning for anything out of the ordinary. Security firm Barracuda Networks has taken it a step further in a study titled “Facebook: Fake Profiles vs. Real Users.”
The study analyzed a random sampling of 2,884 active Facebook accounts to identify key differences between average real user accounts and fake accounts created by attackers and spammers. You can see the results in the infographic above, or if you prefer, a quick summary follows:
- Almost 60 percent of fake accounts claim to be bisexual, 10 times more than real users
- Fake accounts have six times more friends than real users, 726 versus 130
- Fake accounts use photo tags over 100 times more than real users, 136 tags per four photos versus one tag per four photos
- Fake accounts almost always (97 percent) claim to be female, as opposed to 40 percent for real users
