(Newswire.net— January 26, 2019) — Facebook has over 2 billion accounts which is appealing to advertisers. However, half of those accounts are duplicates or fakes, according to Zuckerberg’s former classmate at Harvard, Aaron Greenspan, RT reports.
The company promotes itself as open and trustworthy to advertisers, but deliberately understates the amount of fake accounts pumping up its own value, the report says.
Information exchange between 2 billion monthly active users, has enough randomness to trick the social network’s algorithms to record what amounts to massive traffic, Greenspan claims.
According to Greenspan, The fake accounts are particularly dangerous because they “often defraud other users on Facebook, through scams, fake news, extortion, and other forms of deception.” Greenspan added that the scams often “involve governments.”
In addition, Greenspan claims that Facebook is “selling” ads to “hundreds of millions of phantom buyers – users who do not actually exist.”
In his report, Greenspan claims that since the end of 2017 Facebook has deleted at least 2.8 billion fake accounts, which is more than half of all accounts created on the network.
Facebook immediately reacted with a statement disputing Greenspan’s claims. “This report is completely wrong and not based on any facts or research,” the company told RT. The company refereed to the fact that accounts are checked quarterly with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Facebook attracts advertisers by using algorithms that filter its 2 bn users to specific targeted groups that are straightforward to comprehend and target with an advertisement. That is why Facebook analyses your clicks and points of interests. However, some reports claim that in reality a sizable amount of traffic online is generated by ‘fake-clicking’ done by humans working on specially-organized ‘click farms. Reports claim that there are „clicking bots“ installed due to the lack of human resources.
Despite all attacks on the company, Facebook’s role in global online marketing is expected to grow. According to digital publishing agency Polar, Facebook together with Google and Amazon will control about 80 percent of all digital advertising in 2019.