A recent report from the legal research group Plainsite claims that as
many as half of Facebook’s users are fake.
A report from Aaron Greenspan of
the legal research initiative Plainsite claims that as many as half of
the users on the social media platform Facebook are in fact fake
accounts. Greenspan’s report alleges that Facebook has lied to the
public about just how large the site’s fake news problem is, how many
bot accounts exist on the platform and that the company has “lost
control of its own product.”
Greenspan writes that the world has changed significantly since
Facebook’s founding and that despite Silicon valley’s optimism, the
company is facing huge issues:
What seems too good to be true often is. The zeitgeist has changed
markedly since 2007, when the company was the obsession of virtually
every Silicon Valley investor, having built its Platform to make the
world “more open and connected.” Yet as bad as things have been of late
for Facebook, with endless privacy breaches and Russian interference in
the 2016 presidential election hanging over Menlo Park like a spectre,
we believe that the situation is far worse than investors realize.
Facebook has been lying to the public about the scale of its problem
with fake accounts, which likely exceed 50% of its network. Its official
metrics—many of which it has stopped reporting quarterly—are
self-contradictory and even farcical. The company has lost control of
its own product.
Greenspan further explains the effects of fake accounts operating on the
platform and how this can affect not just the public perception of
Facebook, but could damage investors also:
Greenspan notes that while Facebook has long prioritized user growth and
expansion over everything else, the company is failing to generate new
users in recent years. Greenspan alleges that Facebook is currently only
being kept afloat by millions of fake bot accounts inflating user metrics:
Preaching that programmers should “move fast and break things,”
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has
clarified over time that growth at any cost is his only priority. But
documents recently revealed show that since 2012, management has worried
about where it can find more warm bodies to sign on. Fake accounts have
been keeping the company that Columbia professor Tim Wu has called an
“attention merchant” afloat. The cost of Zuckerberg’s dissembling,
dating all the way back to 2004, has accrued, and is finally coming due.
Accordingly, it is increasingly likely that Facebook will go the way of
AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy—if legal liability doesn’t bankrupt it
first.