More than 50 percent of Facebook users are fake according to a report
“Facebook has been lying to the public about the scale of its problem with fake accounts, which likely exceed 50% of its network. Its official metrics—many of which it has stopped reporting quarterly—are self-contradictory and even farcical. The company has lost control of its own product.”
It is widely accepted that a large portion of accounts on Facebook are fake, and our position is that a large potion of advertisement budget spent on Facebook is worthless because it gets consumed by click-fraud farms. But the problem may be bigger than we thought. Following Facebook’s horrible 2018 year, a report released on Thursday, Jan. 24, 2019 suggests as many as half of Facebook’s two billion accounts are fake or duplicates.
According to Aaron Greenspan, the platform’s measurement of its user base isn’t—and will never be—precise enough. Therefore, the metrics they report are overestimated.
The report also comes with a disclosure that reads: “Aaron Greenspan owns FB put options in his personal capacity. He entered into a confidential settlement with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, Inc. in 2009.”
The fake accounts are particularly dangerous because they “often defraud other users on Facebook, through scams, fake news, extortion, and other forms of deception” and often “involve governments,” he writes.
He further accused the company of “selling” ads to “hundreds of millions of phantom buyers – users who do not actually exist.”
How can any social media company verify a “real identity” from a fake identity? The only way to do so is to institute a process much like opening an online bank account, a process that requires some form of deeper identification.
If you use Facebook at all, you have most likely received a friend request from someone you don’t know. If you research that user account, chances are you will find it is an account that has few if any photos posted, few posts, and very little engagement on any content on that user’s wall. It is a fake account. Fake accounts are big business, and Facebook is not doing enough to stop the proliferation of fake accounts on its platform.
In future blog posts I will dive into specific examples of why advertising on Facebook can be a complete waste of money, including an example of promoting a video on Facebook that generated over 40,000 views but did not result in a single phone call. This led to a very interesting discovery of how Facebook counts “views”, resulting in view counts that are exponentially inflated.
I believe Facebook can not be fixed, at least not without new senior management in place. A new social media platform is needed that demands arduous verification and constantly monitors its user base to eliminate cloned and fake accounts. The number of “real” accounts in such a network would be a fraction of what Facebook reports its user base is, but users could actually trust that new platform. Advertisers would be able to trust that a large percentage of their advertising dollars are being consumed by click-fraud farms.
After a never-ending erosion of online privacy via companies tracking everything users do online, the trend seems to be reversing direction and users are being given the tools they need to take back some control over how their online activities are tracked.
Facebook 2018 Year in Review highlights the top ways people are being exploited on Facebook and its subsidiaries like Instagram. Unsurprisingly, most of them are pretty depressing, confirming what we all already knew from previous years – Facebook can’t be fixed.
It really is not that much of a blow for Google to shutter Google+. Google admits that Google+ has “low usage and engagement” and that 90 percent of Google+ user sessions last less than five seconds.
If you are not familiar with the search engine DuckDuckGo yet, you will probably be hearing more about it from now on. DuckDuckGo is a search engine, like Google, Yahoo or Bing, but with DuckDuckGo your searches and your IP address are kept 100% anonymous. People seeking ways to reduce their digital footprint online is driving the rapid traffic growth at DuckDuckGo.com.
The human brain consists of 100 billion cells called neurons. The neurons are connected together by synapses. If sufficient synaptic inputs to a neuron fire, that neuron will also fire. This process is called “thinking”.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are shaping many of the products and services you interact with every day. In future blog posts I will be discussing how Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Neural Networks, and Predictive Analytics are being used by Marketers to achieve competitive advantage.
According to Pew Research Facebook users continue to reduce the amount of time they are spending on the platform. Just over half of Facebook users ages 18 and older (54%) say they have adjusted their privacy settings in the past 12 months, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Around four-in-ten (42%) say they have taken a break from checking the platform for a period of several weeks or more, while around a quarter (26%) say they have deleted the Facebook app from their cellphone. All told, some 74% of Facebook users say they have taken at least one of these three actions in the past year.
There are, however, age differences in the share of Facebook users who have recently taken some of these actions. Most notably, 44% of younger users (those ages 18 to 29) say they have deleted the Facebook app from their phone in the past year, nearly four times the share of users ages 65 and older (12%) who have done so. Similarly, older users are much less likely to say they have adjusted their Facebook privacy settings in the past 12 months: Only a third of Facebook users 65 and older have done this, compared with 64% of younger users. In earlier research, Pew Research Center has found that a larger share of younger than older adults use Facebook. Still, similar shares of older and younger users have taken a break from Facebook for a period of several weeks or more.
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