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The social network has revealed that 8.7 per cent of its 955 million active users might not be real.
Company filings published this week revealed that duplicate profiles made up 4.8 per cent of users, user-misclassified accounts made up 2.4 per cent, and users described as ‘undesirable’ made up another 1.5 per cent.
Combined, this makes up an estimated 83.09 million fake accounts.
Duplicates, the largest of group of ‘fakes’, is made up of accounts that users maintain in addition to their principal account.
Accounts categorised at user-misclassified are those that have been created for businesses, organisations or non-human entities such as a pet.
The last category, undesirable, contains profiles deemed to be in breach of Facebook’s terms of service, such as profiles used for sending out spam.
Facebook is hoping to make some money by persuading businesses to set up brand pages. The sheer number of fake profiles could seriously damage this approach.
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