Posted on 08/02/2012 11:05:08 AM PDT by library user
Facebook's share price dipped below $20 on Thursday after reporting slowing growth and an admission of an alarming number of fake accounts.
In a quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the social media company said that as many as 83 million of its accounts are fake.
It also reported that as many as five percent of its active users have duplicate accounts.
Facebook members grew to 955 million this year.
It says 1.5 percent of its accounts are likely spam or accounts set up for other malicious activity. The fake accounts are concentrated in developing markets, according to the filing.
It also blames people who set up accounts for non-human entities, such as pets.
There are "inherent challenges" in measuring usage," the social network said.
"We are continually seeking to improve our ability to identify duplicate or false accounts and estimate the total number of such accounts, and such estimates may be affected by improvements or changes in our methodology," the filing continued.
The number of real users is important for Facebook as it seeks to sell advertising.
They’ve known this all along. They should be in jail for putting out false information in their IPO.
It better not be - it has two cats that live with it.
Neither of them are on Facebook - they consider it a waste of time that could be better spent taking a nap.
1/6th of the world is on facebook. Right.
Reminds me when Myspace dropped the registration age from 18 down to 13 a few months before they IPOed the stock to boost the number of users. Didn't the stock drop to half the price within a year (as liberals abandoned the NewsCorp owned company)?
He might be. How would we know?
... I would hit his adds every time I saw one.
That's akin to sending a load of sh*t back to AARP in their Postage Paid Business Reply Envelope every time they send an offer to join. I like it!
So, I'd consider clicking his ads, just in case. But, I have add-ons to block ads in my browsers and I'm not sure I care to disable them.
Unless users live as non-opinionated Saints and especially when visiting fb, they are insane to advertise their lives on the Internet like that.
My husband foresaw the consequences of opening one’s life to FB and forbid anyone from doing it.
One son took his warning; the other opened an account once he got into college. He was soon sorry. His dad collected some pics the kid really did not want to share with dear ole dad. The story is, mom has not seen them. :)
I have a “real” FB account on which I post nothing but links to articles referenced by FR; there’s no point in posting anything else since the discourse of my “friends” is otherwise too insipid to bother with. And I have a “fake” FB account I use exclusively to access dozens of sites that allow commentary. The “fake” account uses one of my noms de guerre (war names)for such commentary. The “fake” FB account also keeps my “real” FB account from being consumed by all the FB crap injected by the commentary sites.
“The dog has about 50 friends who are cats and dogs.”
Wow! I’m impressed! Your dog has more FB “friends” than I do!
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