What stops them from making more facebook accounts?
Essentially it's extremely difficult to create a new Facebook persona and have it look at all authentic. Not impossible, but at least 250x more difficult than creating a new GMail account.
Fake accounts get shut down very quickly, they have a mechanism that seems to detect those accounts very quickly.
We also used to create fake people using photos from stock art libraries and try to create realistic social lives for them, with our aim being that our real friends would eventually start enquiring after the fake people as if they knew them.
We were pretty bored.
I have encountered numerous fake profiles that have survived for months/years. Many of these represent businesses that should really be pages. Others are accounts that are used on hate groups/pages exclusively and have highly offensive fake names.
The worst example I've seen was a vicious cyberbullying profile that Facebook allowed to accumulate hundreds of friends, under an obviously fake name, despite a large number of abuse reports.
I have never, nor shall I ever, maintained an account on Facebook.
This means that I will forever opt out of commenting on TC articles.
I let my Yahoo account die over half a decade ago.
:)
IM(NSH)O the massive drop in comments on TechCrunch is an indicator of how many people don't have (and don't want) an account on Facebook.