Facebook’s 500 Million Isn’t As It Seems

With Facebook recently announcing that it has surpassed the grand total of 500 million users, the authenticity of this figure must surely be called into question. This massive figure would indicate that one in every 14 people in the world has a Facebook account... hmm.

Although there may indeed be 500 million "accounts" on the Facebook platform, I know for a fact that many individuals have duplicate accounts that they use for entirely different reasons and purposes. However, one dubious area that this particularly led me to investigate was that of Facebook gaming.

Without going into too much detail, it seems fairly obvious that games like Farmville (although I must confess I have never played it) rely on the volume of players participating, Having "neighbours" is apparently highly beneficial, and what better way to accumulate a bunch of generous neighbours than to create them all yourself? This theory could of course be applied to many different Facebook games. This is most certainly not to say that Facebook games are bad, just that they may have lead to Facebook's numbers being bigger than they actually are.

There are of course numerous other reasons for creating multiple gaming accounts. Many users may just want to keep their personal feeds free from game-related updates, whilst others use it to protect their real accounts from in-game friends who may not be friends in reality. Nonetheless, it is against Facebook's Terms of Service to do this.

About half of Facebook's user base is considered as being active on a day-to-day basis, which leads me to call into question the extent to which fake accounts are being created. It seems that Facebook may have quite a battle on their hands in solving the problem.

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