MANILA, Philippines — Facebook launched its first Philippine office in April 2016. At that time, more than 49 million Filipinos were already on the social networking site, 44 million of whom accessing it on mobile.
In its Digital 2018 report, the London-based consultancy We Are Social said there were 67 million accounts on Facebook in the Philippines, matching the total number of internet users in the county. Another 10 million Filipinos were on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.
In May 2018, Facebook opened its new head office at Bonifacio Global City in Taguig and launched initiatives to help small to medium as well as large businesses tap a $4-billion e-commerce opportunity.
We Are Social’s Digital 2020 report showed that Facebook was the most used social media platform in the Philippines. Last February, Facebook was used by 96 percent of internet users in the country over the past month. This was followed by YouTube (95 percent), Facebook Messenger (89 percent), Instagram (64 percent) and Twitter (56 percent).
The 2020 report also showed that social media users in the Philippines are the most active, spending an average three hours and 53 minutes daily. With the global average for daily time spent on social media is two hours and 24 minutes, Filipinos accounted for more than one-third of our total internet time.
In June 2020, Facebook said it was investigating the surge of dummy accounts being reported by students and faculty of some universities, such as the University of the Philippines, De La Salle University and the University of Santo Tomas.
Facebook later said it had seen evidence of the duplicate accounts “engaging in coordinated or malicious activity focused on creating fake accounts.”
The Department of Justice has also opened a probe of these accounts but has not disclosed any findings.
The social media giant said that it has estimated that 5 percent of its worldwide monthly active users are fake accounts. As of the first quarter of this year, it has removed 1.7 billion fake accounts from Facebook globally. —Inquirer Research