Facebook has more duplicate accounts than Snapchat has users

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.