PAYou know when you get those random adds off robots posing as Playboy models on Facebook? It turns out it’s more than just a handful.
No – the spam add is kind of endemic and now, the social media giants have announced up to 270 MILLION users are fake and duplicate accounts.
In short, far too many friend requests to ignore. Facebook said around 2-3% of its 2.1 billion monthly users in the third quarter of 2017 were ‘user-misclassified and undesirable accounts.’
GettyThe fake accounts were made up of businesses and organisations mistakenly set up as profiles rather than pages.
The site has often prided itself on being generally less cluttered, compared to competitors such as Twitter.
It comes at a heated time for the social network as people are calling for them to reveal how ‘fake news’ and politically biased advertising could have possibly affected the results of the 2016 US election.
How? Well Facebook admitted 126 million users in America saw adverts funded by Russia – a further 20 million saw similar things on Instagram.
It’s not all bad news though – earlier this month the social network revealed their Facebook Messenger Lite app – an alternative to the standard messenger.
What is the ‘lite’ version? It’s a ‘slimmed-down, faster and more efficient’ messenger which sees the likes of Facebook stories and GIFs abolished, therefore saving a load of data and hassle.
The ‘lite’ version also means you save space on your phone.
Bad news for some of you though, Facebook Messenger Lite is only available for most people with an Android phone as there’s still no iOS version.
Google PlayAndroid users can keep both the ‘lite’ and full-sized version of the Facebook Messenger app for when they need to send and receive GIFs.
Facebook has made a number of changes over the past few months as well.
If you’re not already aware, they launched the Snooze Button – it allows users to temporarily unfollow individuals, pages, and groups for periods of 24 hours, a week, or 30 days.
This may come in handy during periods of social unrest or during elections, or even perhaps when you don’t want to be bombarded with opinions.
In other words, it’s handy pretty much all of the time, because Facebook is full of it.
The social media site is, once again, offering you a way to get rid of annoying friends – the ‘see fewer posts like this’ button fills a similar requirement.
GettyIf you’ve updated your Facebook app since early last month, I haven’t, but you’ll have noticed it looks very different thanks to the social media site introducing more changes.
The changes include; increased colour contrast to make the typography more legible, larger link previews so text is easier to read and bigger ‘like, comment and share buttons’.
Circular profile pictures have also been introduced, similar to rivals Twitter. Awkward.
