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Thursday, 27 September 2012 06:08

Facebook has started to delete fake accounts

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Looking at the picture below you are probably thinking “Whoa! Way to go Adele!” but that's not what is this post about. Apparently Facebook has started to massively delete fake accounts, and by those numbers it certainly looks like they have got their hands full. One of most impressive falls is Zyngas's Texas HoldEm Poker, they lost over 96000 fans after this operation started. Illegitimately created accounts, malware likes, or likes from compromised accounts are being removed.

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According to Facebook “On average, less than 1% of Likes on any given Page will be removed”; that is, if the page didn’t get their likes from hackers. Even though these account drops from the picture seem quite big, if you consider the amount of total likes it's not much. On the contrary it is close to nothing. This move by Facebook should have the biggest impact on users or companies that just started their page, and want to get more fans overnight, so they do illegal stuff to achieve it. If you see a page that has tons of fans, you will probably want to see what it is about.
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Also these fake statistics could be bad for page Admins, since they will never get true feedback on their posts. Hopefully this will also remove those fake accounts that send users fake friend requests and you never know what they will do once they get access to your data. For some reason I get quite a lot of friend requests from Turkish people, the same thing happened on MSN a few years ago. No one likes spam, or fake accounts, and if you combine those two, well it gets chaotic. This move was also initiated due to insufficient demand for Facebook ads because there were quite a lot rumors going on that they were clicked by bots, with these chart you can see that those were true, and that certainly turns people away from the service.

[Ed – The removal of the accounts is something that Facebook simply had to do. There was (and still is) plenty of evidence that many of the likes and clicks are from fake accounts which turns advertisers off. If they cannot get a good measure of potential traffic there is no reason for them to take the risks. Now that Facebook is a public company they are going to have to make some changes to keep investors happy. In the end this could actually be a good thing for Facebook users, but we will have to wait and see just what they end up doing…]

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Read 3056 times Last modified on Thursday, 27 September 2012 06:17
Damir Brodjanac

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