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Exclusive: my life as a fake Facebook account

There’s an interesting class action lawsuit under way in America (no, don’t stop reading already) with a small business filing that Facebook personnel have known for years that its so-called potential reach metric is “inflated and misleading.” And that top Facebook execs have known this for years – while sticking by it in public (it’s obviously worth lots of money.)

Facebook’s own numbers suggest that duplicate accounts make up 11 per cent of the above metric (2.5 billion people a month) while five per cent are fakes. It’s often the case, in these cases, that the reality is rather more.

So Facebook has been selling lots and lots of people two or more times. I get this because I had a Facebook account (why? Because you did – although I think I only used it once.) But I’d read somewhere that you should put some false information in as well as correct stuff (your name) to evade its snooping.

The upshot was that when, after happily linking from MAA for ages, it demanded proof of who I was and I couldn’t remember. They would argue they were doing their job, fair enough. But I couldn’t be fagged to reset all the information (seemed to take forever) and therefore gave up. So no more linking to to Facebook, sorry about that.

But I still get stream of social messages from the wretched platform, which presumably means Facebook thinks (or is happy to suppose) I still exist. These are mainly people who to befriend me. Which is very nice of them, but I can’t respond (not that I really need Facebook friends.)

But, here’s the point at last, I guess I’m still being sold by Facebook as an advertising eyeball.

Nice work if you can get it.

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