There is no public list of all Facebook and Twitter members.
Mostly true True in substance, wrong in a detail.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
The second judge would not resolve this claim; the verdict shown is the first judge's.
What would count as true or false
Judge as of 2021-11-11. True: neither Facebook nor Twitter published, or let anyone publicly obtain, a complete list of all its members/accounts at that time. Platforms publishing aggregate user counts, or individual profiles being viewable or searchable one at a time, do not count as a public list. Mostly true: no official complete list existed, but partial dumps or scraped datasets covering a large share of users were circulating publicly (for example the 2021 leak of about 533M Facebook users' data). The claim's point still holds, with a minor caveat. Mixed: a public list existed for one platform but not the other. Mostly false: a near-complete list of members was openly and publicly available for both platforms, but not an official or fully complete one. False: either company officially published, or offered public access to, a complete list of all members.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (4)
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E1 Facebook data leak now under EU data regulator investigation BleepingComputer · 6 April 2021
“The mobile phone numbers and other personal information of hundreds of millions of Facebook users worldwide were leaked on a popular hacker forum for free after it was sold in June 2020 for an estimated $30,000 and made searchable via a private Telegram bot.”
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E2 Data Protection Commission Data Protection Commission (Ireland) · 6 April 2021
“A dataset, appearing to be sourced from Facebook, has appeared on a hacking website this weekend for free and contains records of 533 million individuals.”
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E3 How We Combat Scraping Meta (Facebook) · 15 April 2021
“Scrapers who improperly collect data from Facebook sometimes make this data available in online forums such as the one that was reported on last week.”
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E4 Twitter confirms recent user data leak is from 2021 breach BleepingComputer · 12 December 2022
“In September 2022 and November 2022, a threat actor released a JSON file containing the complete set of 5.4 million records scraped in 2021, which privately circulated among a small number of threat actors until then.”
Reasoning
None of the evidence shows that Facebook or Twitter published, or offered public access to, a complete list of members as of 2021-11-11. Facebook's own account (E3) describes such data as collected improperly by scrapers. However, a scraped dataset of 533 million Facebook users appeared for free on a hacking forum in April 2021 (E1, E2), which matches the criteria's "mostly true" caveat about large partial dumps circulating publicly. The 5.4 million Twitter records scraped in 2021 circulated privately and were not released publicly until late 2022 (E4).
Cite this claim
Balaji Srinivasan, “There is no public list of all Facebook and Twitter members.” (said 11 November 2021). Verdict: mostly true. Reliability API, claim c_877fada8512a, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_877fada8512a
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
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Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.