There are over 83 million fake Facebook accounts
According to filings made by Facebook earlier this week, there are more than 83 million fake Facebook accounts.
The filings reveal that of the 995 million active users on Facebook, 8.7 percent of them could be a fake which is bad news for investors of the social network, as Facebook is their primary source of revenue.
Facebook has divided the suspected fake accounts into three classifications in the filing:
The first, there are 4.8 percent of ‘duplicate’ profiles. A duplicate profile is an account that a user maintains to his or her principle account.
Secondly, there are 2.4 percent of fake accounts which are ‘misclassified’ accounts where users have created personal profiles for a business, organization or non-human entity such as a pet.
Thirdly, there are 1.5 percent of ‘undesirable accounts’ which are intended to be used for purposes that violate Facebook’s terms of service, such as spamming.
Facebook said in the filing,
“We enable advertisers to engage with more than 950 million monthly active users (MAUs) on Facebook or subsets of our users based on information they have chosen to share with us, such as their age, location, gender or interests. We offer advertisers a unique combination of reach, relevance, social context and engagement to enhance the value of their ads and generate a substantial majority of our revenue from advertising. The loss of advertisers, or reduction in spending by advertisers with Facebook, could seriously harm our business.”
