Worth noting that not all these "fakes" are bad, or even inactive or less active.
For example, most performers on the Burlesque scene have accounts specifically for their Burlesque personas, with names like "Kitty Cupcake" or "Tabitha Taboo" and the like. These are obviously not their real names, but a consequence of the fact that Burlesque performers don't want the offline attention on their personal or professional lives outside the performing scene, and that it is standard on that scene to have an alternate identity, in the real world, who is the Burlesque artist.
The two identities are cleanly separated in real life as well as online, and they tend to use Facebook online to network with each other, get gigs, post photos, accrue fans, and so on. I know several such artists who can't be bothered to update their personal Facebook profile much, but are very active Facebook users under their Burlesque pseudonym, with many friends/fans/connections.
To consider these accounts "fake" seems, to me, like a mistake. These are very legitimate use of a social networking platform. It would be a mistake for Facebook to target such accounts and close them down. They would generate immense bad will amongst an increasingly influential community of artists.
>"These are very legitimate use of a social networking platform."
I have many friends (not strippers, unfortunately) who are active on the site with completely fraudulent personal information.
The problem isn't that the accounts are inactive. The problem is that businesses are buying ad-space based on the data produced by these "fake" accounts. When my 30 year-old female friends from Canada are generating data as 65 year old, married men from Wisconsin, someone trying to advertise to those men is going to get a raw deal.
>"It would be a mistake for Facebook to target such accounts and close them down."
Facebook won't close them down, both for the reasons you mention (these are real, active users) as well the fact that it's important for them to be able to boast about user figures. If the published number is 83MM, my bet is the reality is higher.
I have a fake account I set up. During my internship after college, our HR recruiter sent us an email with a link to like their internship facebook page. The email wasn't a request.
So I made a fake account to like their page. If HR got a hold of my real account and Facebook turned off my privacy settings, I might not have been hired.
My ex-girlfriend used a second Facebook profile to earn rewards in the *ville games (or something, I have no idea how those games work). Truly fake secondary accounts like that are probably quite common given the popularity of those games. All of this just demonstrates that using "monthly active users" as a metric is meaningless and Facebook need better and more well thought out metrics.
This is a huge problem I've harped on before, that will get worse in the future. We've all seen Zynga get buried the past few weeks; what happens when large flows of people stop playing these games? It's much harder for the people still playing to achieve some of the "Ask 10 friends!" objectives that are so prevalent.
This is very common on the Zynga *ville game scene. There are massive rewards for sharing (ie. spamming) your friends and having them click links. So it's better to spam yourself with two or more fake accounts to get those rewards.
Good point. I also know for a fact that a lot of underground (and not-so-underground) musicians use a standard Profile for their Facebook presence instead of a Page, as well as a Profile for their real identity.
Is this using the system wrong? Yes. Are they getting the full benefits of Facebook when managing their online fanbase? No. Do they care? Nope.
Also worth noting that this phenomenon exists everywhere.
For example, the standards for Nielsen ratings used for (much more expensive) TV advertising are pretty lame. If you're in the same room as a powered-on television, you're considered a member of the audience.
My other question would be... does it matter? Wouldn't the ability to target burlesque folks (who are real people, just not real names in this example) with laser-like precision be more valuable than trolling for real burlesque aficionados amongst the general population?
"an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account."
The problem there is that a person trying hard to keep personas separate can do so without Facebook being able to track (I assume they have to be more specific than just matching by IP address).
Re: Matching IP address - given the prevalence of NAT, in which several thousand users will be associated with a single IP address - you can't rely on that.
Cookies, on the other hand, or, browser-fingerprint-matching, probably can be used to identify these shill accounts. I wonder if Facebook knows how many of it's accounts are fake, or if they actively avoid looking into that information.
Then again, while it is common for us 'computer folk' to have more than 1 computer, a lot of households have just 1 shared by many people. My sister's family has 1 shared computer with 3 Facebook users (soon to be 4 in a year or two).
For example, most performers on the Burlesque scene have accounts specifically for their Burlesque personas, with names like "Kitty Cupcake" or "Tabitha Taboo" and the like. These are obviously not their real names, but a consequence of the fact that Burlesque performers don't want the offline attention on their personal or professional lives outside the performing scene, and that it is standard on that scene to have an alternate identity, in the real world, who is the Burlesque artist.
The two identities are cleanly separated in real life as well as online, and they tend to use Facebook online to network with each other, get gigs, post photos, accrue fans, and so on. I know several such artists who can't be bothered to update their personal Facebook profile much, but are very active Facebook users under their Burlesque pseudonym, with many friends/fans/connections.
To consider these accounts "fake" seems, to me, like a mistake. These are very legitimate use of a social networking platform. It would be a mistake for Facebook to target such accounts and close them down. They would generate immense bad will amongst an increasingly influential community of artists.