Facebook says it thinks 83 million profiles are “fake.” Is that a credit to Facebook’s policing, or an erosion of Facebook’s credibility?
In company filings this week, social networking giant Facebook provided a customary laundry list of risk factors that could impact the company’s business going forward. A few of those risks have raised eyebrows in the technology, advertising, and investment communities, particularly Facebook’s own assessment that some 8.7 percent of profiles on the service are “fake.”
For years, Facebook has hammered home the message that it only wants profiles from real people and businesses on the service. Folks found to be maintaining a Facebook profile under a pseudonym, handle, or a name other than the one that appears on their birth certificate have often their profiles summarily deleted from the platform.
Is the fact that nearly one in ten profiles on Facebook are “fake” a tribute to Facebook’s efforts to keep it real and only permit profiles reflecting real-life people and businesses? Or does it represent a significant failure to keep scammers, ne’er-do-wells, and “fake people” off the service?
Who’s fake?
Facebook breaks down its estimate of “fake” users into a few categories. By far the largest is people who maintain two or more Facebook accounts, in spite of Facebook’s efforts to enforce its terms of service and limit individuals to a single profile. The company estimates that about 4.8 percent of its 955 million active accounts — or about 45.8 million users — represent such duplicate accounts.
Many of those users aren’t fake at all: They’re real people who are really using Facebook. However, those duplicate accounts are a violation of Facebook’s terms of service. If Facebook believes (or just suspects) someone is operating more than one profile, they’ll often encourage users to narrow themselves down to just one profile, or sometimes require users verify the identity of a questionable profile by attaching a mobile number or submitting a drivers’ license photo. Sometimes Facebook just outright suspends or deletes the profiles it believes violate its terms of use.
More recently, the company has rolled out an automated profiling system that issues warnings to users the company believes might be operating multiple accounts. That system appears to be generating many false positives, particularly in cases where multiple people use the same computer.
The Good…
Many folks who use multiple accounts do so for entirely innocuous reasons. They may have a personal account for themselves, but also operate a separate account for a business as part of their job or profession. Some people use multiple accounts as a way to separate professional and personal uses of Facebook. A so-called social media consultant might maintain a sizable network of connections on their personal profile, but have a second (quieter) profile where they engage with family and maybe a few guilty pleasures like Farmville and Words with Friends that they don’t want diluting the “branding” of their “real” personal page. Others might set up secondary profiles for more pressing privacy reasons: for instance, to avoid the scrutiny of bullies or an abusive former spouse.
Many of these uses of multiple accounts are essentially challenges to Facebook’s “real names” policy, and Facebook’s stock response is that users must stick to a single account and avail themselves of the services’ expanded (and famously fiddly) privacy controls to regulate what information is available to different sets of Facebook users. That’s a tricky line to walk, since Facebook is notorious for opting its users into sharing information by default, meaning the best way to try to keep something private on Facebook is probably not to do it via an account everybody knows about.