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Comment by rsivapr | Hacker News Reader

I would think it's fair assumption that a significant percentage of those users are being counted multiple times if they have duplicate accounts.

EDIT: I don't see how the above statement beckons downvotes. Yes. It was an assumption, but not absurd one at that. Here's one such article that talks about fake accounts -- http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/02/tech/social-media/facebook-fak...

EDIT2: Last year Facebook said 4.8% of their MAU was duplicate, misclassified, or spam accounts. That's 51+ million today assuming the percentage has remained constant.

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It's not a fair assumption. It's a cynical assumption. And an incorrect assumption. Why don't you be a little more careful?

Who has duplicate accounts on Facebook?

Every social media employee? I would guess most have separate personal accounts and accounts used to manage their company's pages.

That's not how Facebook Pages work - a Page isn't an account you log into, it's something your main Facebook account can have admin rights to (and a Page can have multiple administrators). I have admin rights on a few Facebook Pages but I only count as a single active user, and I don't have to log out of my Gregor account to administer them.

Historically, some brands did create full Facebook accounts, but Facebook now discourages that and as far as I know most brands are using Pages now. For a while Zuck's dog, Beast, was a notable exception (he had a Facebook account long after that was discouraged) but it looks like he's just got a Page now.

(I used to work at Facebook.)

I don't recall Beast ever having anything but a Page - in fact, I remember that Zuck mentioning in a Q&A that he was using Beast to get a better feeling about what it's like to run a Page.

Could be - I think my memory of the non-Page account dates to mid-2011, and that's plenty long enough ago for my memory to play tricks on me.

GREGOR!

how many social media employees do you think there are? do you think it's a significant number at this scale?

I'm not sure that has a significant impact on the numbers :)

Fake accounts != Duplicate accounts

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