Thread by @soychicka

Wait.
WAT?

1.5 BILLION?

Somebody's going to have to explain this to me...

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1063652086426955776

Facebook has ~2.25 billion MAU (active users per month) at start of Q3.

They claim that between Q2 and Q4, they removed 1.5bn accounts?

And in the 6 months prior, 1.3bn accounts?

Ah, but here's the rub:

These accounts are predominantly accounts that are created and disabled shortly thereafter - they are NOT the long-lived accounts that push the most insiduous content.

If you take a look at the numbers of accounts terminated in response to user complaints, it's only 0.4% of those accounts that get acted on because of user reports.

So, on average, 250M fake accounts get created and busted every month...

That's more than the total number of MAU in the US and Canada combined.

FFS.

I wonder what percentage of those fake accounts claim to be US residents?

It'd be nice if Facebook gave a bit of metadata on all deleted accounts for analysts to look at... ie activity, account lifetime before deletion...

Because really, all facebook is telling us is that they catch the creation of fake accounts, not that they're catching and terminating bad actors.

I'd really like to see numbers linked to the accounts that have been terminated for TOS violations and 'inauthentic' behaviour not described above - most importantly, patterns of user reports prior to termination.

I'm not even going to guess at report #s against IRA accts.

Yet, somehow, even though these 250M accounts comprise 10% of total MAU bd, they calculate it to only reflect 3-4% of MAU?

This is just so wholly unsatisfactory that I'm going to stop before it makes me more ragey.

Here's the link to the report. transparency.facebook.com/community-stan…