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Future

Imaginary Friends: Fakebook's 83 Million Bogus Accounts

MASHABLE (USA), BBC NEWS, DAILY MAIL (UK)

Worldcrunch

The number of fake accounts on Facebook is roughly the size of Egypt's population and larger than most of the world's countries, reports Mashable: 83.09 million.

The astonishing figure makes up 8.7% of all Facebook's 995 million active viewers, says the Daily Mail. According to the London daily, Facebook classified the fake accounts in three groups:

-4.8% were duplicate accounts, such as accounts set up by people to keep their activities hidden from their partner or their parents.

-2.4% were "user-misclassified" accounts, where "users have created personal profiles for a business, organization or non-human entity such as a pet" according to Facebook.

-1.5% were "undesirable" accounts were profiles were deemed to be in breach of Facebook"s terms of service; accounts set up to send out spam emails.

Facebook, reports BBC News, whose business model relies on targeted advertising, is coming under increased scrutiny over the worth of its advertising model which promotes the gathering of likes from users.

Last month, the BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones set up a fake company to investigate allegations of fake likes. His investigation found that the large majority of likes for the fake firm originated from the Middle East and Asia.

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Green

The Problem With Always Blaming Climate Change For Natural Disasters

Climate change is real, but a closer look at the science shows there are many factors that contribute to weather-related disasters. It is important to raise awareness about the long-term impact of global warming, but there's a risk in overstating its role in the latest floods or fires.

People on foot, on bikes, motorcycles, scooters and cars navigate through a flooded street during the day time.

Karachi - People wade through flood water after heavy rain in a southern Pakistani city

Xinhua / ZUMA
Axel Bojanowski

-Analysis-

BERLIN — In September, thousands of people lost their lives when dams collapsed during flooding in Libya. Engineers had warned that the dams were structurally unsound.

Two years ago, dozens died in floods in western Germany, a region that had experienced a number of similar floods in earlier centuries, where thousands of houses had been built on the natural floodplain.

Last year saw more than 1,000 people lose their lives during monsoon floods in Pakistan. Studies showed that the impact of flooding in the region was exacerbated by the proximity of human settlements, the outdated river management system, high poverty rates and political instability in Pakistan.

There are many factors that contribute to weather-related disasters, but one dominates the headlines: climate change. That is because of so-called attribution studies, which are published very quickly after these disasters to highlight how human-caused climate change contributes to extreme weather events. After the flooding in Libya, German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described climate change as a “serial offender," while the Tageszeitung wrote that “the climate crisis has exacerbated the extreme rainfall."

The World Weather Attribution initiative (WWA) has once again achieved its aim of using “real-time analysis” to draw attention to the issue: on its website, the institute says its goal is to “analyse and communicate the possible influence of climate change on extreme weather events." Frederike Otto, who works on attribution studies for the WWA, says these reports help to underscore the urgent need for climate action. They transform climate change from an “abstract threat into a concrete one."

In the immediate aftermath of a weather-related disaster, teams of researchers rush to put together attribution studies – “so that they are ready within the same news cycle," as the New York Times reported. However, these attribution studies do not meet normal scientific standards, as they are published without going through the peer-review process that would be undertaken before publication in a specialist scientific journal. And that creates problems.

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