Why do I have two Facebook accounts with the same email?
Hi everyone, Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com, here's the question.
I seem to have two Facebook accounts using the same email address address.
How do I delete the one I don't want?
Here's the problem.
Facebook actively prevents you
from associating a single email address with more than one Facebook account.
You can't create an account that uses
an email address that has been assigned to another account.
And on top of that,
I don't believe you can even assign an alternate email address or
an additional email address to your Facebook account if that email address is
also assigned or in use by a different Facebook account.
In fact, if you look at it, if you try,
which I've done, you end up with this message.
Email address is already in use.
So I don't really know how people are arriving at this conclusion.
However,
I have a theory. But before I get to the theory,
I do want to point out that there actually is one very specific possible example or
possible way that it can kind of sort of happen.
I don't think this is what most people are
running into, but I do need to include it for clarity.
Have a look at these two email addresses, Askleo@randomisp.com
and Ask.Leo@randomisp.com. Now, are those
two different email accounts or not?
They're two different email addresses, but whether or not they represent two
different email accounts depends on the email service provider.
Gmail, for example, ignores periods in the email address prior to the @ sign.
What that means is if these had been Gmail accounts, these actually represent
the exact same Gmail account and the exact same Gmail inbox.
However, for other email providers, that may not be the case.
These may be completely unrelated to one another.
Now let's go back to that first scenario
where perhaps you're using Gmail and perhaps there's a period in there.
Facebook sees these as two different email addresses.
So it is possible to create two separate
Facebook accounts with the same email account if the email provider allows you
to use different email addresses to represent the same account.
So, like I said, if this were @gmail.com
Ask Leo and Ask.Leo would be two different email addresses to Facebook,
and it would let you assign them to two different accounts.
But as far as Gmail is concerned, it's a single inbox, it's a single account.
The same thing can actually be done with some of the other
tagging features that are available in some email providers.
For example, Ask Leo-Spam@randomisp.com could very well be a separate email
address that's associated with AskLeo@randomisp.com.
That's a feature some email providers allow you to set up that allows you to use
a single account, a single inbox, but allows you to use different email
addresses for the different services that you sign up for.
The idea is then that when you see that,
say, AskLeo-Spam was suddenly added to a spam list,
then you know that wherever it was, you used that version of your email
address, they got compromised or they did something unethical or whatever.
But it's all a single inbox.
So that would be another way to create
multiple Facebook accounts with different email addresses that all funnel
into the same email account and the same email inbox.
Now, that's one possibility.
I have to throw that out there,
and I don't think it's a common one because people typically they either do or
they don't use periods in their email addresses.
So what else might be going on?
Here's my theory.
We have to start by understanding
the difference between a Facebook account and a Facebook page.
They are two very, very separate things.
A Facebook account is intended to represent a person.
If you're playing by Facebook's rules,
an account can represent one person and every person can have one account.
Now, in reality,
we can all go off and create multiple email addresses from different providers
or whatever and set up different Facebook accounts ourselves.
But the idea is that an account represents a person and every person has one account.
The only time I think that really gets enforced is in the case of complaints.
Right.
If somebody starts complaining about multiple Facebook accounts associated
with the same person, Facebook may take some action.
However, Facebook requires that Facebook accounts be people, actually humans.
And that actually started getting enforced a few years ago because what a lot
of people had done, myself included, was created a Facebook account for a pet.
So the pet looked like it had its own Facebook account because it did.
Facebook went through and decided that no, that's no longer acceptable.
Facebook accounts need to be people.
What you had to do if you had one of these
pet accounts was converted to what's called a Page.
Page is this other thing.
Pages can represent, well, all sorts of things.
There are Pages for businesses like Askleocom.
There are pages for places.
There are pages for celebrity fan clubs.
There are pages for just about anything that you can think of.
What's important about a Page is that you cannot log in as a page.
A Page is created by an account.
So, for example,
my personal Facebook account is the account that created and administers
the Ask Leo! Fan page, the Ask Leo! Page on Facebook.
I can have multiple administrators,
and in fact, I do so that in case something happens
to me or there's a problem, somebody else can step in so that a Page
can have multiple different Facebook accounts assigned as administrators.
So you got accounts which represent people
and pages that could represent anything else.
Really.
Here's where things start to get weird.
You can name a Page anything you want,
which means that I can have an account called Leo A. Notenboom,
but I could then go ahead and create a page called Leo A. Notenboom.
Pages can, in fact, look very much like accounts.
I could set up a profile picture.
I could set up a background.
I could set up a number of other things
to be identical with my account only on that page.
Yes, they'd be laid out differently.
And you'd have to know what to look for,
because it would not look like an account if you understand the difference.
But the fact is, it could easily be mistaken as an account.
It gets worse.
Facebook allows you to use Facebook as if you were that page that gets really weird.
So what I want to do is I want to show you exactly what that means.
Let's head on over to Facebook and look
at a page I've created and an account I have.
Okay, so here we are on Windows Ten for what that's worth in Edge.
And I'm going to go into Facebook.
There we go.
And you can see I've already signed in.
This is my Ask Leo Example Facebook account.
This is an actual account that I've created.
It has its own separate email address, and it represents, theoretically,
a person, but it's an example account, so it kind of sort of makes sense.
Now, over on the left hand side here we have this thing called Pages.
If I click on that, you'll see that there are two things that are worth looking at.
One is your pages. As this account
Ask Leo Example, I created a page called
Walter the Wondercorgy. But I've also liked Pages.
You can see that list down here.
So if I click on that, you can see that not only have I liked
Walter the Wonder Corgi, but I've also liked Ask Leo, the Ask Leo page.
And I've also liked something called the Daily Corgi.
These are just the pages that I've liked.
If I go to any of these, I'm just a visitor to those page.
These two Ask Leo or the Daily Cordy.
I'm just a visitor to this page.
I have no special permissions.
I have no special anything.
However, if I go visit Walter the Wonder Corgi,
I want you to pay a little attention to this lower left hand corner
of the window here, because there will be a message that comes up.
You're now interacting as Walter the Wonder Corgi.
What does that mean?
Well, it means that anything that I do on this page while I'm here will be as if
a person or an entity called Walter the Wonder Corgi did those things.
And it kind of sort of makes sense.
If we scroll down here,
we'll see eventually that there's a post or two that I've made.
Here's an example post,
and you can see that the example post was made by Walter the Wondercorgy if I were
to comment on it while I'm commenting as Wonder the Walter Corgi.
In other words, I'm acting as if I were that page, which makes sense because pages
would seem to want to post content as themselves.
It doesn't necessarily make sense for me.
Ask Leo Example to post content on this
page or to even comment on things on this page, even though I could now
where it really gets strange, I'm going to go back to my Account News feed.
So this is the default page I just clicked
here on the Facebook icon or on the Home icon.
And I'm at the Ask Leo Example Newsfeed, the default feed from Facebook.
So what I'll do is I'll just scroll down to a random post down here.
I'll use this one and click On Comment.
Now this will allow me to write a comment,
but you'll notice that the little icon here that matches essentially the profile
picture for this Example account, and I haven't set one.
It has a little down arrow next to it.
If I click on that down arrow,
I now have the option of interacting as Walter the Wondercorgy.
And if I do that and I comment now,
you'll see that I am commenting as Walter the Wondercorgy.
I'm not going to do it here because I
don't want to leave a comment on this post for real.
But the idea is that this little control over here on Comments and on Likes allow
you to interact with pretty much all of Facebook as that page.
Very much like you could interact
with Facebook as an account, which you do by default, normally.
So my theory is that enough of that happens
that people think there's an account by this other name.
Remember, I can create a page that has the exact same name as my account.
I could, in fact, have created a page called Ask Leo Example.
I didn't do that because that would be really confusing.
But I think it's that confusion that's
leading folks to think that there are multiple accounts with their name.
So what do you do?
It is possible
that you could have accidentally created a page for whatever reason.
There's enough things that are confusing
about Facebook that it kind of sort of makes sense.
If you find that you have accidentally
made a page that has the same name as your account, you should find it here,
listed under your pages while you're logged into your account.
What you can do then is go over to that page, scroll down to find Settings.
Scroll down some more, and you can click on Remove Page.
Now let's be clear.
That will remove everything associated with the page, all the posts that you've
made as that page, all the photos that you have uploaded as that page.
But it will remove the page and presumably remove the confusion,
leaving you with only your account, the account you think you had to begin
with, and of course, the account that you could log in with.
Finally, if you find a page or an account
that looks like you, it has your name, it has some misspelling,
and you have no way of signing into it or getting access to it.
It's not showing up on your page list
then the best guess I have is that you are the victim of impersonation.
Somebody has set up an account or a page using your name and potentially stealing
your photos to making it look just like you.
This turns out to be fairly common.
My recommendation if that happens if you think that happens is to report it the way
to do that was covered in could someone set up a fake Facebook account in my name
where the answer is a very clear yes and that article includes the steps you
need to take to report it to Facebook and get it taken down.
I hope this is helpful.
I hope this clears up a little bit
of the confusion that might cause some people to believe they have multiple
accounts when in fact they don't have a look at your page list.
See what's there and just maybe that will help you for updates for comments
for related links and more visit askleo.com/143379. I'm Leo Notenboom
and this is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.