According to a new report, Facebook is having difficulty identifying how many of its users actually are duplicate accounts and could estimate much lower numbers than reality. According to the Wall Street Journal, several employees of the social network said in an internal presentation this spring that the system used to detect duplicate accounts tends to underestimate them.
Double accounts: Facebook struggles to identify them
Reportedly, a study on 5,000 recent registrations the service indicated that only between 32 percent and 56 percent of the profiles actually belonged to existing users, with duplicate accounts making up nearly or more than half of the total. This data, of course, raises doubts about the estimates that Facebook provides to advertisers on the number of users that can be reached, potentially casting doubt on a fundamental pillar of social profits.
During the past few hours, a spokesman of Facebook to clarify, releasing a statement to the Wall Street Journal: “It is not news that we are closely studying the cloned accounts and this collection of information does not tell the whole story.” According to the spokesperson, these data do not change the fact that advertisers still get the desired results by turning to the social network.
At the moment, according to official data released by the company, duplicate accounts should be around 10% of the total, or 10% of approximately three billion. This data obviously does not take into consideration the alleged difficulties of the social network in identifying duplicate accounts, created very frequently by users who are blocked from accessing for any reason from their main account.
In short, at the moment the picture is not very clear, and without a strong stance on the part of personalities inside the company it will be difficult to see the complete picture.