2% of Facebook Users Use Fake Names
By Jesse Davis on Aug 30 th, with 3 COMMENTS
We were curious as to how many Facebook users actually use their real first and last names for their profiles. And when we are curious about something here at Entrustet, it can only mean one thing: blog post! So some of us went through our Facebook friends lists and kept track of the number of friends using fake names for their Facebook profiles. Our sample size was relatively small, but it’s still a good gauge of an answer to the question: how many people use fake names on Facebook?
Criteria
- Those using a middle name instead of a last name were considered “fake,” but those using first, middle, AND last name were considered “real”
- Those intentionally misspelling their names were considered “fake.” Example: If my Facebook name were Jesse Day-vis
Results
- 78 of the 3,779 profiles surveyed were fake. Thus, 2.06% of the profiles surveyed used fake or altered names.
Conclusion
One way of looking at this is to say that 2.06% of people use fake names on Facebook. Another way to look at it is to say that 97.94% of people use real names on Facebook. I actually think the fact that 97.94% of people use their real names is quite a more telling way to look at these results. I find it pretty incredible that Facebook’s users have continued to show this much faith in the same company that gets bashed continuously for privacy concerns. People don’t really seem to care much about attaching their real identity to a Facebook identity. Will Facebook one day be our official unifying online identity? Perhaps. We will have to wait and see…
August 30, 2010 at 8:10 pm, stacey pitsillides said:
RT @Entrustet: 2% of Facebook Users use fake names in their profiles: http://ow.ly/2wVSU
December 06, 2010 at 8:14 pm, Facebook: los datos reales de los usuarios | Electric Skies said:
[...] (1): http://blog.entrustet.com/2010/08/30/2-of-facebook-users-dont-use-their-real-names/#more-1170 [...]
December 13, 2010 at 5:35 pm, verifyhim said:
[...] will become a powerful additional tool for screening in the future. According to a report http://blog.entrustet.com/2010/08/30/2-of-facebook-users-dont-use-their-real-names/, 97.94% of people use real names on Facebook. Facebook is already covered by VerifyHim.com; and we [...]