Facebook’s Bad Week: Are 83 Million Accounts Fake?
Facebook is having a rough week. First, they disclosed in quarterly filings that up to 8.7% of all accounts on the social networking site may be fake. And just yesterday, their stock price fell below $20 a share for the first time, marking continued poor performance since a disappointing IPO.
CNET reports that Facebook disclosed the account stats as part of their efforts to calculate an accurate number of active users. While these TOS-violating accounts encompass duplicates or pages created for pets or babies, Facebook estimates that 1.5% of all accounts are “undesirable accounts,” created for spamming or other negative purposes.
Still, even if all of these accounts are indeed fake, duplicates, or not allowed for some reason, that 8.7% (83 million users) still leaves 872 million real accounts.
At the same time, the stock price offers less of a silver lining. TechCrunch contextualizes that $20 number like this: by some calculations, this stock price could value Facebook at less than the price that Microsoft offered for Yahoo in 2008, a company one would think is much less auspicious than the central social networking site.
Oh yeah, and Mark Zuckerberg‘s sister and brother-in-law now work for arch-rival Google. The search engine giant (and competitor through Google+) now employs more Zuckerberg relatives than Facebook! Hope next week looks better, Mark!
