Facebook has more duplicate accounts than Snapchat has users

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Facebook’s userbase is a curious number. Not only is it the largest of any social network on the planet at 2.07-billion users per month, it also has more duplicate accounts than Snapchat has users.

The company’s earning report, released Wednesday, announced a spike of over 60-million users in Q3 2017. Daily active users are also up, now tipping the 1.4-billion mark.

But lurking within these numbers are some 207-million duplicate accounts.

“This quarter, we implemented a new methodology to help identify duplicate accounts,” noted CFO David Wehner in an earnings call.

“As a result, we increased our estimates for duplicate accounts to approximately 10% of worldwide MAUs from our previously disclosed estimate of 6%.”

He explained that duplicate accounts aren’t fake or bots, but tertiary accounts owned by a single user that “represent real activity and engagement on Facebook”.

Facebook has more than 200-million duplicate accounts, with 60-million policy-breaching fake accounts

In relation to other social networks, that number is enormous.

It’s around 1.5x that of Snapchat’s last quoted daily user base. It’s also two-third of Twitter’s stunted monthly user figure of 330-million.

But while duplicate accounts aren’t ideal for Facebook, they’re by no means as damaging as fake, policy-breaching accounts.

These, Wehner added, amount to between 2-3% of the quoted monthly user figure, which could be as much as 62-million.

Facebook’s “inauthentic account” problem will likely continue to grow as user base increases, but the company has been trying to address the issue.

“We continuously monitor and aggressively take down those accounts. These accounts tend to be less active and thus we believe impact DAU less than MAU,” Wehner concluded.

Feature image: Memeburn

Andy Walker, former editor
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