Chapter 5. Increasing Internet use: the role of education, income, gender, age and location Box 5.2: How accurate are Facebook user statistics? Statistics on the number of Facebook users are widely cited, especially given their impressive growth rates over the past few years, but little is published about how those statistics are compiled or what they actually represent. For example, a comparison of Facebook user data and Internet user data for some developing countries show there to be as many Facebook users as Internet users, whereas it can reasonably be assumed that not every Internet user is also on Facebook. How then can these numbers be explained? Country-level Internet user statistics are generally collected through official representative national household surveys and reflect the number of individual people in a given country having used the Internet during a certain reference period (for example, the past three/six/twelve months). The survey is often limited to a certain age group (see Annex 3) and does not include Internet use by enterprises, governments or other organizations. Facebook user statistics for individual countries, on the other hand, are published by several online businesses19 which compile the data from Facebook’s advertisement page,20 where numbers are to be found on the potential target audience (i.e. users) by country. According to Facebook’s Help Centre, “Facebook determines the location of a user based on IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, which can help identify the country or city where a user is physically located.” 21 Based on this information, Facebook “users” should perhaps be called “accounts”, given that a single user could be operating several accounts. In addition to a personal account, a user can create an account for a school, business, organization or other group using a different e-mail address (so that there could, in theory, be more Facebook users than people within a country). In addition, while IP addresses make a good proxy indicator for how many accounts exist in a given country, they are not necessarily accurate, given that Facebook users could be accessing their Facebook accounts through servers located in countries other than their home country (for example, in cases where Facebook access might be restricted or where users are travelling). Finally, the question of how “active” the account should be in order to be counted needs to be addressed. How many “dead” accounts are there and are they included in the user statistics? Until answers to some of these questions are known, Facebook country-level “user” statistics should be treated with caution, par-ticularly when making comparisons with Internet user statistics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