Facebook admits 83 million profiles are bogus

Facebook has more than 83 million fake profiles, including millions created for users’ pets and a large number of accounts the company deems “undesirable”

The figure emerged in Facebook’s first quarterly report to U.S. financial regulators since the world’s biggest social network made its much-criticised stock market debut in May. In a return published this week, the company said 8.7 per cent of its 955 million users are not real.

There were 83.09 million fake users in total, which Facebook classifies into three groups. The largest is made up of almost 46 million duplicate profiles, accounting for 4.8 per cent of all accounts. The company defined that category as “an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account”.

What were deemed “user-misclassified” profiles amounted to 2.4 per cent, almost 23 million, where Facebook says “users have created personal profiles for a business, organisation or non-human entity such as a pet”.

Finally, “undesirable” profiles accounted for the remainder, about 14 million, which are deemed to be in breach of Facebook’s terms and conditions. The company said this typically means accounts that have been set up to send spam messages or content to other Facebook users. In March, when Facebook last gave an estimate of the number of fake or duplicate accounts, it said the proportion was in the region of 5 per cent or 6 per cent, which at the time meant between 42 million and 50 million.