I have at least two Google accounts and a very old never-really-used Youtube account (from the days before it was a Google account), so it's very appropriate that you say "profile count" rather than "user count".
It frustrates me to think I count in this number even though I only have a fake Facebook account under a fake name and with no friends, simply because my job requires that I log into their developer account occasionally.
You and other fake test accounts by developers are still a rounding error. More interesting statistics is how many fake accounts are created for influencing discussion. Twitter has a huge problem with this, Facebook seems to handle it better but even if it is a single digits (1-5%) it is still tens of millions of accounts
I legitimately wonder how many of these accounts are "real" (e.g. not bots, not developer accounts, not "old" accounts, not parody accounts, etc). I know I have 3 accounts myself (various developer accounts), but even nontechnical friends "remake" their FB every year or so pretty regularly (my sister has a good 5-6 accounts that she no longer uses anymore). And that's completely ignoring however many spam/bots there are out there spamming FB messenger, groups, friend requests, etc.
You know the old joke where the mentor says "pay me 100 dollars and I'll show you how to make a million dollars"?
I laughed a little because reading the post about facebook's user growth immediately nags me to sign up for facebook. Nothing against facebook; the irony just got a chuckle out of me.
Maybe you are implying this. But even logging out of Facebook, they will continue to track you and gather information about you through every site that has a Facebook like button on it.
That's mind-blowing to me. Is that correct that roughly 26% of the world population is on Facebook? Or are these numbers representative of total users since the beginning of the site?
If it's the latter, then I'd be curious as to how many users actively use the site today.
It could be either one. Daily active were 1.28 B and monthly active were 1.9 B so either way it is likely they have both crossed, or are about to cross the 2B mark.
why would it be likely that daily active users ballooned 56% to surpass 2B? Seems like it must be monthly active in the discussion. Did FB do something recently that leads to your remark
I checked the date, slightly confused. Just to make sure: could you send me the lottery numbers for the last two years?
Anyway, that Facebook about-us page also has an article from summer 2015 about hitting 1 Billion daily active users for the first time. Their growth really isn't that impressive any more (+280Million in two years), mostly because they've run out of people.
they crossed 3 months ago when I still worked there but didn't want to share it broadly because they thought it was a temporary spike due to some political unrest in SE Asia. Safe to assume they are over the hump by now.
Facebook is non-rivalrous but is is excludable (that is, one user of Facebook does not 'take up a slot' preventing any other users from using it, but you can be prevented from using it if you don't 'pay', i.e. follow the TOS).
In general, public goods are things like air, languages, street lights, and national defense. Facebook (as far as I know) is not critical to your safety or survival, so you'd have a devil of a time trying to convince anyone that it's a public good.
As a litmus, I would wager that the odds of Facebook or any other website becoming a public good before the internet are nearly zero, so once it happens to the internet, we'll come back to it.
Microsoft at it's peak was more powerful and monopolistic than Facebook, with the same public good questions popping up. Now few would feel that way. It's pretty amazing how technology can disrupt seemingly invincible entities. Facebook's dominance is quite precarious over a multi-decade timeline.
I recently created a dedicated fb account to connect with some people, and I was very very surprised how dull fb is. I tried it back in the days and felt it had some value, in terms of UX and "connection" but now it's all foobar and gimmicky. Very odd. I would never had expected it to reach 2B so fast. I wonder if it's mostly because of mass + [o]auth capabilities so ubiquitous now.
It's a social network. If a lot of your friends are not on it (or are not active on it), expect it to be dull. Most people use it as a clubhouse not a personal journal.
If you friends don't post, then your feed will largely consist of advertisements or pointless posts from pages.
No, but you don't want to make it more difficult for them to reach you. Nobody is willing to do the extra work for that. Friction. You're not special enough.
I’ve never had meaningful interactions over FB. It’s just recipes in GIF form, distant relatives Liking product pages in exchange for discounts or sweepstakes entries, and political bullshit.
My friends and I keep in touch like we always have. We call and visit and do things together. SMS works just fine for group communication.
It is both amazing and deeply concerning that one corporation has influence over 1/4 of the world's population. It is even more concerning when you consider the outsized voting power of 1 person at that company.
His point is not that Coca-cola has _no_effect on you, but their effect on you is pretty much limited to getting you to drink Coke, because that's their goal.
Facebook can, has, and certainly will continue to monitor and influence MOST aspects of peoples lives - social, political, religious, economic, etc. Just ads and subtle filtering of walls and ads alone is provably HUGE impact-wise.
I saw a vice piece which showed that they used human content filters, at least for some stuff.
In any case the rules determined for their human or algorithmic content filters are culturally arbitrary, and Western-biased. For example, if Facebook was a Saudi company, you can bet more than nipples would be banned.
What point are you trying to make? Can you elaborate? "Ahem" and a link don't do a good job of forming or supporting a specific point.
Edit: Why do people think these are unreasonable questions? Does Google attempt to influence by ordering search results? How can any publisher avoid attempting to influence when any difference in content is potentially influential?
Adding to the reason above, Facebook has been creating filter bubbles for years now. As a feature! Leading to the influence of Fake News and people who believe it.
I remember a few years ago when they experimented with explicitly influencing their users' emotions by manipulating their feeds and home pages. They caught a lot of flack for it (as they should have), but I doubt it stopped there.
>Facebook is a platform. They don't do a lot of attempting to influence, as far as I can tell.
It's a platform that has algorithms to pick what news 1/4th of the world reads. And who has access to the personal data of 1/4 of the world.
>Consider Google as well, which probably reaches even more of the world's population. Or Microsoft. Apple might be getting close, too.
Yes, but Apple just makes devices. Their Cloud services are not of the type that expert influence of FB or Google kind.(Neither is Microsoft's products).
Both Facebook and Google have actively influenced political events.
>[..] on election day in 2010, Facebook sent ‘go out and vote’ reminders to more than 60 million of its users. The reminders caused about 340,000 people to vote who otherwise would not have.
: https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...
For more interesting stuff on this topic, look up the company 'The Groundwork'.
Problem is, there isn't any oversight that any person outside of those companies could look at to ensure that it isn't attempting to influence. We know about various studies they've done at Facebook but there is no way, beyond trust, to know if they or any inner groups are attempting to do any influence. Even an accidental bug could influence a startling amount of people and no one would ever know.
When a single platform has the eyes and attention of a third of the world's population each day, even the smallest things, purposeful or not, could cause a ripple of change.
I would argue Coke, Samsung, Frito-Lay, etc are different. They can't make instant changes or do AB testing on a scale that Facebook can. Facebook could give a single page over to an algorithm that runs millions of experiments a day to learn how best to influence a person in a certain way, iterate on that and continue. A single engineer, with their scale and data, could set this up given the proper permissions.
When Microsoft was monopolizing the world, the government stepped in. Now the EU is going after Google. What is the government doing about Facebook?
Imagine if the government hadn't stepped in to limit Microsoft's monopoly; today there would be no Facebook; everyone in the tech industry would be a Microsoft employee and everyone in the world would be using Microsoft's "Human Social Monitoring System"... and we would chant praises to our dear leader Bill Gates.
Microsoft abused its position as the dominant OS maker to shut competitors out of a different market (web browsers).
I agree the pervasiveness of Facebook is a problem (one of many). But from a legal standpoint, what have they done that can bring a viable antitrust complaint?
Facebook monopolized social advertising. Facebook makes your friends want things that they don't need and in doing so is distorting society's values and encouraging mindless consumerism.
Maybe the government is comfortable with a company that benignly collects personal data on 1/4 of the population, just in case it ever wants to leverage that data.
> Imagine if the government hadn't stepped in to limit Microsoft's monopoly
That seems like a stretch. Microsoft has drastically decreased in influence because they didn't get in on the big new trends soon enough - web search, social networking, and mobile. I don't see how anything the Government did enabled that. At most, the implied threat of further Government action might have prevented them from more drastic efforts to block those things.
There are some attempts in the EU. In Germany, they've been waging a PR battle with the government over fake news, nazi propaganda, and other extremism.
It's difficult because it's not something that neatly falls into established categories, and it quite obviously touches on free speech issues. You can be absolutely sure that, if Facebook were to use its power to promote a political agenda, they'd quickly find themselves on the wrong end of a law. But as long as it's incidental damage, and hard to show with statistical significance, it comes down to the fundamental law of laws: that what doesn't do harm is allowed.
What I suspect will emerge rather soon is a DMCA-style notice/takedown/counter-notice protocol for libel and fake news.
I think it is an overreach to go from 'access to' to 'influence over'. Facebook has access to 1/4 of the worlds population but having access does not imply influence. Only that you can reach them.
It is remarkable that one corporation owns the infrastructure on which 1/4 of the world's population communicates. That makes it an exceptionally good platform for surveillance because even people who are good at keeping their activities hidden now have to make sure that everyone they know is as good as they are.
No doubt because of that risk, any good operational security training will include an example involving leakage through Facebook.
I don't disagree, but I don't think Facebook is responsible for 'fake news' or even 'hate news'. As with any community there are actors within it which self select to group together and communicate. Now what it does do is allow what might be a dispersed group to become a 'local community' but Facebook's role in that is providing the access, not in influencing what those people do or say.
One need only step between rabidly conservative and rabidly liberal enclaves on Facebook to see different groups surrounding themselves with their own messaging.
To date I don't see Facebook exerting an editorial influence that is swaying meaningful sized groups. Sure there are groups that use Facebook to do that, but it isn't something you can buy or arrange for from the company.
See the comments below regarding Facebook's algorithms about what gets presented in people's feeds. Facebook is absolutely a principle player in what people see, by virtue that their algorithms can be gamed in particular ways, and their promotion of news and products can be bought. To think that Facebook isn't selling outsized influence over people's feeds for obscene amounts of money would be naive.
EDIT: I believe this is also the secret to Reddit's success...
I see it differently. I see people gaming Facebook's algorithms just like people have worked to game search engine algorithms for years, in order to push their message in front of people who would be receptive to it. I don't see Facebook as the agent of that gaming which is perhaps an insignificant point as far as some in the discussion would consider but for me it is the essential point.
I see Reddit, Facebook, Topix, Google+, HN, all providing "watering holes" or a place for a community to form, and these days there is always an algorithm connected to a mechanism for the community to use to signal its approval and disapproval. In "broad" community sites like Facebook and Reddit there is an explicit 'hands off' policy on how those communities operate (until there isn't). That supports a wide number of communities and optimizes for high user counts. In "narrow" community sites like HN and various forum sites, there is an explicit 'hands on' policy which drives the community to a particular place. That optimizes for content/discussion that is highly aligned with the owner's editorial goals even at the cost of ejecting users who don't align with those goals.
The way I think about it, for a multi-community site to actively "influence" its users, the site operator would have to apply some mechanism for shaming or promoting specific communities within it. Further it would associate users with that level of compliance which would signal to them if they were 'betting better' or 'being worse'. The signalling is needed to help the users understand which way they are "supposed" to go, without that signalling it is much harder.
So multi-community sites don't (and won't) do that because it results in users leaving and taking their eyeballs with them. And ultimately the point of such sites is to collect as many people there as possible with as wide a demographic as possible, so that people can advertise goods and services to them.
it doesn't have influence of 1/4 of the world's population. first of all, 2 billions might be pure humans but some of them are bots. second of all, I have facebook, so what? how does it influence me? I spent 5 minutes per week if not per month chatting in facebook, use adblock, have no posts, no photo.
Well, Zuck's dog Beast has a profile with a million likes and since a human is actually operating it, it is as legitimate a profile as yours or your pet snake's (assuming you keep it active)
That is excluding China...So it is more impressive if we do the calculation, 2B out of 6B population if we assume the current world population is 7.5B.
yes, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Snapchat, Picasa, WordPress.com, Blogspot, Blogger, Flickr, SoundCloud, Google+, Google Hangouts, Hootsuite are all blocked according to [1]
1. http://www.saporedicina.com/english/list-of-blocked-websites...
Oh yeah, you think you're safe because you don't have a Fb account, or closed it when it was popular to do so. Guess again... Your "friends" will keep posting you and they keep building a profile.
Better yet, I suggest people keep their Fb account, and pollute it and lock it down. Don't install the phone apps. Ban their emails with @facebook.com and @fbcdn.com . The long and short; ghost them and don't be the product.
One of the most frustrating (and shady) things I have seen Facebook do is ask your friends personal information about you. I have very little personal info on my profile, but I know that Facebook has all of it. Because I have seen little popups saying things like "Where did your friend so and so go to highschool?"
Then later, you will see a question on your profile like, "Did you go to ... High?" So you know they are storing it whether you confirm or not.
They will also ask "security" questions to people trying to reset their password. They seem to include a few things that are in Facebook and then a few items that are not. This gathering even more details about my personal life that I did not choose to share with Facebook.
I try to frequently seed it with false information. But I know plenty of people are out there just merrily giving up all my personal information to this beast.
I think Facebook counts you as active even if you're logged in, never go to the site, but see any site with a like button. I've blocked Facebook using both Safari Content blockers and my `/etc/hosts` file, but I wonder if they have other ways of attempting to count me in.
The reason I go with Safari Content blockers and /etc/hosts is because both of those solutions stop network requests before they even attempt to make a network request. uBlock is a good backup solution, but I want my computer to think Facebook doesn't even exist as a url, regardless of context.
For example uBlock won't stop iMessage from trying to load Facebook's inline media content when someone messages me a Facebook link.
0.0.0.0 is a better target than localhost, because it means the connection fails immediately rather than possibly timing out, and it won't accidentally succeed if you're running a local server.
The IPv6 variant (two colons, ::) is shorter still.
They don't need to fake count you as active. It would not be beneficial to misrepresent your own stats, because if your engagement numbers don't reflect that to advertisers then you're in trouble.
Someday, the first general AI will make good use of all that neatly organized, easily searchable and voluntarily supplied information and behavior patterns when it's plotting how to turn us into batteries or paper clips.
228 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] threadhttps://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-users/
Insane.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/1/14474534/facebook-earnings...
Still impressive, regardless.
89% of 2 billion is still a mind-boggling ~1.7 billion.
Remains to be seen how many are real humans though.
http://archive.is/zi4Uw
(Origin site appears down.)
Point being that very large user account collections do exist.
I've some awareness of G+ active users.
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq
There may also be other concerns or interests.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...
I laughed a little because reading the post about facebook's user growth immediately nags me to sign up for facebook. Nothing against facebook; the irony just got a chuckle out of me.
If it's the latter, then I'd be curious as to how many users actively use the site today.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/07/some-america...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15880494/facebook-2-billi...
And if you look at these stats from March 2017:
https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/
It could be either one. Daily active were 1.28 B and monthly active were 1.9 B so either way it is likely they have both crossed, or are about to cross the 2B mark.
Another reply, from @jackmodern, indicates that they may have done that, so now I am less confident that it is the daily actives.
Anyway, that Facebook about-us page also has an article from summer 2015 about hitting 1 Billion daily active users for the first time. Their growth really isn't that impressive any more (+280Million in two years), mostly because they've run out of people.
In general, public goods are things like air, languages, street lights, and national defense. Facebook (as far as I know) is not critical to your safety or survival, so you'd have a devil of a time trying to convince anyone that it's a public good.
As a litmus, I would wager that the odds of Facebook or any other website becoming a public good before the internet are nearly zero, so once it happens to the internet, we'll come back to it.
If you friends don't post, then your feed will largely consist of advertisements or pointless posts from pages.
I’ve never had meaningful interactions over FB. It’s just recipes in GIF form, distant relatives Liking product pages in exchange for discounts or sweepstakes entries, and political bullshit.
My friends and I keep in touch like we always have. We call and visit and do things together. SMS works just fine for group communication.
I will admit though, I'm very sad that I have never been invited to a lularoe party.
When you interact with coke does it gently tailor what you see and what you do not see, month after month?
If you cannot understand how people are influenced, maybe you'll never see the influencing happening. That doesn't make you immune, on the contrary...
Facebook can, has, and certainly will continue to monitor and influence MOST aspects of peoples lives - social, political, religious, economic, etc. Just ads and subtle filtering of walls and ads alone is provably HUGE impact-wise.
Consider Google as well, which probably reaches even more of the world's population. Or Microsoft. Apple might be getting close, too.
Or plenty of non-tech companies, as the sibling commenter points out. Coke, Samsung, Frito-Lay, etc.
But leaked documents from their internal policy allows for displaying the Female nipple under certain circumstances.
See => https://hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/fb-art-...
Source: Leaked Document Lays Out Facebook’s Policy on Sex and Nudity in Art => https://hyperallergic.com/380911/leaked-document-lays-out-fa...
How do they / their algorithm decide if the nudity is "only contours visible" but not "sufficiently detailed"
Cheap third world labour radicalizes with this impression of a corrupt west.
Cheap thirld word labour joins terrorists and produces horrifying pictures/videos - posted to facebook.
Thus the circle is closed.
In any case the rules determined for their human or algorithmic content filters are culturally arbitrary, and Western-biased. For example, if Facebook was a Saudi company, you can bet more than nipples would be banned.
Ahem: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...
Edit: Why do people think these are unreasonable questions? Does Google attempt to influence by ordering search results? How can any publisher avoid attempting to influence when any difference in content is potentially influential?
It's a platform that has algorithms to pick what news 1/4th of the world reads. And who has access to the personal data of 1/4 of the world.
>Consider Google as well, which probably reaches even more of the world's population. Or Microsoft. Apple might be getting close, too.
Yes, but Apple just makes devices. Their Cloud services are not of the type that expert influence of FB or Google kind.(Neither is Microsoft's products).
edit: sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14648521
>[..] on election day in 2010, Facebook sent ‘go out and vote’ reminders to more than 60 million of its users. The reminders caused about 340,000 people to vote who otherwise would not have. : https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...
For more interesting stuff on this topic, look up the company 'The Groundwork'.
When a single platform has the eyes and attention of a third of the world's population each day, even the smallest things, purposeful or not, could cause a ripple of change.
I would argue Coke, Samsung, Frito-Lay, etc are different. They can't make instant changes or do AB testing on a scale that Facebook can. Facebook could give a single page over to an algorithm that runs millions of experiments a day to learn how best to influence a person in a certain way, iterate on that and continue. A single engineer, with their scale and data, could set this up given the proper permissions.
Imagine if the government hadn't stepped in to limit Microsoft's monopoly; today there would be no Facebook; everyone in the tech industry would be a Microsoft employee and everyone in the world would be using Microsoft's "Human Social Monitoring System"... and we would chant praises to our dear leader Bill Gates.
I agree the pervasiveness of Facebook is a problem (one of many). But from a legal standpoint, what have they done that can bring a viable antitrust complaint?
A better dream is a world free of marketing of any type
That seems like a stretch. Microsoft has drastically decreased in influence because they didn't get in on the big new trends soon enough - web search, social networking, and mobile. I don't see how anything the Government did enabled that. At most, the implied threat of further Government action might have prevented them from more drastic efforts to block those things.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....
It's difficult because it's not something that neatly falls into established categories, and it quite obviously touches on free speech issues. You can be absolutely sure that, if Facebook were to use its power to promote a political agenda, they'd quickly find themselves on the wrong end of a law. But as long as it's incidental damage, and hard to show with statistical significance, it comes down to the fundamental law of laws: that what doesn't do harm is allowed.
What I suspect will emerge rather soon is a DMCA-style notice/takedown/counter-notice protocol for libel and fake news.
It is remarkable that one corporation owns the infrastructure on which 1/4 of the world's population communicates. That makes it an exceptionally good platform for surveillance because even people who are good at keeping their activities hidden now have to make sure that everyone they know is as good as they are.
No doubt because of that risk, any good operational security training will include an example involving leakage through Facebook.
Facebook is a lot of people's primary source of news or even communication.
Humans are a social species and massively influenced by what they hear from others.
One need only step between rabidly conservative and rabidly liberal enclaves on Facebook to see different groups surrounding themselves with their own messaging.
To date I don't see Facebook exerting an editorial influence that is swaying meaningful sized groups. Sure there are groups that use Facebook to do that, but it isn't something you can buy or arrange for from the company.
EDIT: I believe this is also the secret to Reddit's success...
I see Reddit, Facebook, Topix, Google+, HN, all providing "watering holes" or a place for a community to form, and these days there is always an algorithm connected to a mechanism for the community to use to signal its approval and disapproval. In "broad" community sites like Facebook and Reddit there is an explicit 'hands off' policy on how those communities operate (until there isn't). That supports a wide number of communities and optimizes for high user counts. In "narrow" community sites like HN and various forum sites, there is an explicit 'hands on' policy which drives the community to a particular place. That optimizes for content/discussion that is highly aligned with the owner's editorial goals even at the cost of ejecting users who don't align with those goals.
The way I think about it, for a multi-community site to actively "influence" its users, the site operator would have to apply some mechanism for shaming or promoting specific communities within it. Further it would associate users with that level of compliance which would signal to them if they were 'betting better' or 'being worse'. The signalling is needed to help the users understand which way they are "supposed" to go, without that signalling it is much harder.
So multi-community sites don't (and won't) do that because it results in users leaving and taking their eyeballs with them. And ultimately the point of such sites is to collect as many people there as possible with as wide a demographic as possible, so that people can advertise goods and services to them.
https://spideroak.com/articles/facebook-shadow-profiles-a-pr...
Oh yeah, you think you're safe because you don't have a Fb account, or closed it when it was popular to do so. Guess again... Your "friends" will keep posting you and they keep building a profile.
Better yet, I suggest people keep their Fb account, and pollute it and lock it down. Don't install the phone apps. Ban their emails with @facebook.com and @fbcdn.com . The long and short; ghost them and don't be the product.
Then later, you will see a question on your profile like, "Did you go to ... High?" So you know they are storing it whether you confirm or not.
They will also ask "security" questions to people trying to reset their password. They seem to include a few things that are in Facebook and then a few items that are not. This gathering even more details about my personal life that I did not choose to share with Facebook.
I try to frequently seed it with false information. But I know plenty of people are out there just merrily giving up all my personal information to this beast.
This really bums me out.
Nearly no one in my age range uses FB, just snapchat + ig.
If you want to comment here you need to be nice, regardless of how someone else behaved or how old you think they might be.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14648376 and marked it off-topic.
Same database, different name.
For example uBlock won't stop iMessage from trying to load Facebook's inline media content when someone messages me a Facebook link.
for linux use: https://github.com/tbds/FreeContributor/tree/master/data
https://www.perpetual-beta.org/weblog/blocking-facebook-on-o...
This appears to be broken.
The IPv6 variant (two colons, ::) is shorter still.