The Carbon Cost of Facebook’s Phantom Profiles
On 1st August, news broke of data released by Facebook which reveals its carbon footprint, the first time the company has made such figures public.
3rd August 2012 | Peter Rolton: Chairman, Rolton Group
They report emissions equalling 285,000 metric tons of CO2 in 2011, and the individual footprint of an average monthly active user (MAU) comes in at 269g per annum. In conjunction with this, the company has recently filed its quarterly report to the Securities and exchange Commission, stating that 'as of June 30, 2012, we had 955 million MAUs,' of which 8.7% are invalid.
This figure is broken down by the company into three strata: 'duplicates,' extra accounts maintained by the same user, account for 4.8%, 'user-misclassified accounts' for businesses or pets, for example, total 2.4%, and 'undesirable' accounts, which are used for violations such as spamming, make up 1.5% of the final number.
A quick calculation therefore reveals that approximately 24,795 of the 285,000 metric tons used by the company are being generated by phantom pages. This is the equivalent of more than 40,000 flights from Heathrow to JFK International, or more than a million trips from London to Paris on the Eurostar.
The beginnings of any argument stating that the profiles may receive less traffic than genuine pages are also dealt with, as the figures are drawn directly from MAU data and thus only from those pages which are in as frequent use as their legitimate counterparts.
This somewhat concerning news means that, whilst some real individuals and organisations are working hard to reduce their carbon impact, they are being offset and in some cases nullified as Facebook generates CO2 emissions to support the social networking habits of people that don’t even exist.
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