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Comment by jaimefjorge | Hacker News Reader

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jaimefjorge·

Up until 2 months ago they had 8.7% of fake users http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57484991-93/facebook-8.7-pe...

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"900 million human on earth actively uses facebook", is still an impressive number to boast about.

not really no. Compare to how many humans use the web or are simply connect to the internet, now that's impressive.

But knowing that many humans use the internet as a transport to a walled garden aware of their IRL identity and holding captive a heap of their personal data, this is frightening.

> not really no.

Please stop it.

If that number is still roughly accurate, it is a pretty impressively low number. I imagine that the average percentage of fakes/bots/etc. for web services is much higher.

0.087 * 900M = 78.3M

Roughly the equivalent of all of Germany's population (with 80M) being Facebook fake users.

Nevertheless I agree.. Impressive low number. Due to the scale of user base this still translates into a ridiculous amount of fake users

Actually, I think the scale is precisely what makes the number seem so low to me. It's a damned hard accomplishment to grow to 900M users while only picking up 80M fakes along the way.

80M is a large number, sure. But there are probably sites and services with 100M supposed users that have 80M fakes (some dating sites come to mind, as did MySpace in its prime). And I'm probably only exaggerating a tiny bit.

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