Facebook's alleged growth is largely coming from countries where Facebook says it has a fake account problem

By Facebook's own admission, more than 10 billion of the 12 billion Facebook accounts ever created have been fake; Facebook's growth has stalled out in high-income countries like the USA (where the company is actually losing users), and the majority of growth the company posted in 2018 came from "India, Indonesia, and the Philippines," which also happen to be places where Facebook says it has "meaningfully higher" rates of fake account creation, exacerbated by "episodic spikes" of fake accounts.

Facebook claims to have 2.3 billion users, but it also has made a series of contradictory and confusing disclosures about that number that make it hard to credit: they told the SEC that 5% of their accounts were fake and 11% were duplicates (up from 1% and 6% in mid 2017), but no one knows what that number means because in 2018 the company stopped releasing quarterly numbers and switched to annual reporting. And in any event, Facebook won't reveal its methodology for determining fake and dupe accounts, saying that they use a "limited sample of accounts" and then apply "significant judgment" when interpreting their findings.

But separately, Facebook says it saw 2.2 billion fake accounts created in Q2 2019 (that it knows about). That's the same number of active users the company claims to have. It's a big number.

We're left having to take Facebook's word for the size of its user-base. The number of active Facebook users has a direct relationship to the rates that FB can charge to its advertisers, so it has a powerful motivation to, uh, optimistically interpret its data, and the fact that no one else is allowed to check its work makes the whole thing pretty dubious. Read the rest