[junker101]

> Facebook has a massive incentive to stop fake accounts

As an advertiser, I am pretty certain this is not the quite case in (current) reality. A large part of FB's proposition for more money from us includes:

A) Pay more for increased reach and engagement.

B) Our traffic isn't decreasing (despite outside reports/indications to the contrary) and you would be missing a massive and engaged audience if you didn't spend with FB.

This combined with the fact that a _lot_ of ad-spend isn't directly attributable to conversions (often by design), means that more "activity" whether its fake or not, drives up ad-revenue for FB.

You see the same issue occur with other publishers by the way. -It is not uncommon for a publisher (or other related party) to purchase a swarm of fake bot traffic to boost impression and engagement numbers of an ad buy they've sold. -Advertisers un-aware of how much of the traffic to their ads are bots vs legitimate humans (read: "publishers stealing money from advertisers") is a major problem for advertisers, but the bigger the publisher, the harder it is to 'not' be on their platform too. (and FB is _very_ big)

[lazzlazzlazz]

> B) Our traffic isn't decreasing (despite outside reports/indications to the contrary)

It's not. Even the "leaks" make clear that overall traffic is still increasing, both overall and per person.

> This combined with the fact that a _lot_ of ad-spend isn't directly attributable to conversions

I've seen direct reports from advertisers at my last job (doing social media analytics) that show how well they can quantify ROI for ad spend. Fake accounts would negatively impact this number, and it would be extremely obvious immediately.