Trust in Facebook Plummets After Report Claims 50% of Its Users Are Fake (5)

As bad as things have been for Facebook since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke one year ago, one team of researchers, led by a former peer of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard who created one of the original Facebook prototypes, thinks the reality of the company’s circumstances is even more dire than investors realize.

https://themindunleashed.com/2019/01...sers-fake.html

Thoughts?

That full report is one hell of an indictment, and it would seem to make sense to not build your entire business on Facebook in case it gets taken down as a ponzi scheme sometime in the mid future. In the short term I guess FB is still generating lots of sales.

Fake accounts are a problem for real, especially for advertiser who are after engagement. I'm building a page now on FB, running a small campaign to get likes for it and the level of engagement of some of these "bought likes" is insane. I post a video and within 5 seconds it gets likes from some people... They had absolutely no chance to check it out, yet they already liked it. Then there are people who share everything, like 1 share every 5-10 minutes. What normal person would do this. I guess it's all fake accounts or some kind of BOTs that people deploy to simulate user activity.

But still, 50% seems a bit to high to me... In case 50% of FB users are fake, that would be huge.

The number of fake accounts on Facebook has been a subject of conjectures for a long time, and none of the sources were able to convincingly assess its extent. The fact that the platform must have quite a big issue with non-human activities could have been inferred from similar situation happening on other platforms: some researchers claim that Twitter has even more than 50% of the accounts run by machines, although the most trusted assessments are closer to 15% (which accounts to around 55 millions of monthly active users - the population of Spain!). Even if the 50% figure for Facebook turns out to be slightly exaggerated, it doesn't come with a surprise that the management was not entirely sincere about its true extent. Fighting fake news and its derivatives remains a big global challenge and getting closer to the real scale of the problem can only lead to even greater endeavours to deal with it.

As for Facebook's assessment as a traffic source, even if it's harder to fake traffic as ads are displayed to registered users, is still potentially harmful for advertisers same as mobile applications selling ad impressions via SDK to users who installed an app.

The problem seems to lie in how users are acquired and how hard it is to get through installation and registration forms. Usually the harder it gets, the more sophisticated ways (or time) fraudsters need to fake a user account. However, such anti-fraud measures can discourage normal users from registrations causing user acquisition metrics to drop. This is a constant dilemma...

Fake traffic generated from such accounts can lead to major loss especially for CPM-based models. However small % of this fake accounts can operate on click scripts (or use click farm tactics) and be responsible for even 90-95% of clicks causing high prices on CPC-based campaigns and no conversions being delivered.

Karolina with Voluum experts in compliance and data science

Originally Posted by Voluum

The number of fake accounts on Facebook has been a subject of conjectures for a long time, and none of the sources were able to convincingly assess its extent. The fact that the platform must have quite a big issue with non-human activities could have been inferred from similar situation happening on other platforms: some researchers claim that Twitter has even more than 50% of the accounts run by machines, although the most trusted assessments are closer to 15% (which accounts to around 55 millions of monthly active users - the population of Spain!). Even if the 50% figure for Facebook turns out to be slightly exaggerated, it doesn't come with a surprise that the management was not entirely sincere about its true extent. Fighting fake news and its derivatives remains a big global challenge and getting closer to the real scale of the problem can only lead to even greater endeavours to deal with it.

As for Facebook's assessment as a traffic source, even if it's harder to fake traffic as ads are displayed to registered users, is still potentially harmful for advertisers same as mobile applications selling ad impressions via SDK to users who installed an app.

The problem seems to lie in how users are acquired and how hard it is to get through installation and registration forms. Usually the harder it gets, the more sophisticated ways (or time) fraudsters need to fake a user account. However, such anti-fraud measures can discourage normal users from registrations causing user acquisition metrics to drop. This is a constant dilemma...

Fake traffic generated from such accounts can lead to major loss especially for CPM-based models. However small % of this fake accounts can operate on click scripts (or use click farm tactics) and be responsible for even 90-95% of clicks causing high prices on CPC-based campaigns and no conversions being delivered.

Karolina with Voluum experts in compliance and data science