Let’s do some maths on Facebook’s user numbers
Bear with me on some maths here.
Facebook says it will delete a milliard âfaceprintsâ. In The Guardian: âFacebook will delete the âfaceprintsâ of more than a[n American] billion people after announcing that it is shutting down its facial recognition system due to the âmany concernsâ about using the technology.â
We know that you can turn on (and off) facial recognition in Facebook, to enable tagging. This came pretty suddenly, if I recall correctly. I turned it off immediately.
The fact it came suddenly suggests that Facebook had already compiled these faceprints, because we all had the feature if we wanted to keep it. They must have been working on it behind the scenes for a while, before introducing it to every user.
Now Facebook says it holds over an American billion, i.e. a milliard, of them.
If we all had them, as we could turn them on and off at will, then it follows that Facebook only has just over a milliard users.
This gels with their own research into new accounts, where they found that up to 56 per cent of them were owned by existing users. Iâve taken the higher figure here but, frankly, I think theyâre underestimating.
Now, Facebook claims it has 2¡9 milliard users. Once again, just ask yourself: know anyone whoâs recently joined? Exactly. Most of us donât. So the user base shouldnât be rising at the rate they claim. (We all know there are tons of bots on there.)
On the assumption (you may think itâs a wild one) that their research is representative across all of Facebook, that 44 per cent of all accounts are legitimate and the remainder are owned by the 44 per cent, then:
2,900,000,000 à 0¡44 = 1,276,000,000
Remember not long ago I posited that Facebookâs actual user numbers were closer to a milliard?
I donât believe Iâm far off, and this latest news might, if the logic holds up, suggest Iâm right.
PS.: Thanks to Ton Zylstra for inspiring more maths on this. If Facebook finished 2020 on just under 2,000 million users, and now claims 2,900 million, yet the number of social media users increased last year by 400 million, you can pretty easily see their numbers do not add up.
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