Facebook says that millions of user accounts are fake

Fake profiles are everywhere. You can spot hundreds of fake profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media networks.

Although Facebook has introduced a lot of checks which like birthday, email, phone number and more to fight fake profiles but it is still unable to control the fake profiles completely. Although it claims that it will be able to control the fake profiles soon. According to the latest report, more than 9.6% of profiles on Facebook are fake. Which means that more than 200 million accounts out of 2.07 billion accounts are fake on Facebook.

Here’s a quote from the article:

“Facebook estimates that about 200 million of its more than 2.07 billion users may be fakes… [Non-paywalled article here.] Colin Stretch, the general counsel of Facebook, told the Senate Intelligence Committee the company was doubling its review staff to 20,000 and using artificial intelligence to find more “bad actors”… Sean Edgett, Twitter’s general counsel, testified before Congress that about 5 percent of its 330 million users are “false accounts or spam,” which would add up to more than 16 million fakes.”

As mentioned earlier, Facebook has enabled many checks to fight fake accounts but controlling them is very hard. Twitter, on the other hand, has no checks and just an email id is enough to get you going with an account. Twitter says that it has about 5 million fake account which means that out of 330 million accounts, about 16 million are fake. But according to independent experts, the real numbers are higher than that.

“Independent experts say the real numbers are far higher. On Twitter, little more than an email address is needed to start tweeting. Facebook’s requirement that users be their authentic selves means the company asks for a smattering of information to sign up — name, birthday, gender and email address. But few checks exist to verify if that information is true when a user signs up.”

Social media giants must do something to detect and delete these fake accounts as fake accounts are ruining the social media experience.