Facebook and Twitter value the strength of their network by looking at the number of people on their platform
Account totals have long served as a visible measure of platform success.
Active-user figures are harder to inspect, especially for Twitter. Facebook reported 3.06 billion active users in 2025, while Twitter’s figure is more difficult to establish.
Contrast this with LinkedIn, which famously focused on the quality of the network, placing less value on the number of your connections and more on what those connections mean.
That contrast helps explain why fake news and fake profiles abound on Facebook and Twitter but are less common on LinkedIn, which is known for removing fake profiles quickly. The technology is not hard: IP tracing and other ways of spotting duplicate accounts have existed for years. It will not catch everyone, but it would stop most of them.
What does this tell you?
Unless Facebook and Twitter redefine the meaning of success for their platform in their company and abandon their user-based KPIs, fake accounts will stay.
Sure, they’re trying. But when it’s so easy to algorithmically cut off dummy accounts, the question becomes why are they not trying so hard?
As long as account totals are the headline number, neither platform has much reason to look harder.
Originally published on Medium.
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