Facebook: 83 million fake accounts

In its first quarterly earnings report as a publicly traded company, social network site Facebook revealed it now has 955 million monthly active users and 543 million monthly active mobile users. The site notes that nearly 20 percent of the latter number, 102 million users, solely accessed Facebook from their mobile phone in June, but the report also contains contains details on how many of Facebook's users are fake.

The site estimates that 4.8 percent of its users are duplicate accounts, 2.4 percent are user-misclassified (such as profiles for non-human entities like businesses and pets) and that 1.5 percent of profiles were created for undesirable purposes such as spamming. This adds up to 8.7 percent, or 83.09 million of fake accounts.

We estimate that "duplicate" accounts (an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account) may have represented approximately 4.8 percent of our worldwide MAUs as of June 30, 2012. We also seek to identify "false" accounts, which we divide into two categories: (1) user-misclassified accounts, where users have created personal profiles for a business, organization, or non-human entity such as a pet (such entities are permitted on Facebook using a Page rather than a personal profile under our terms of service); and (2) undesirable accounts, which represent user profiles that we determine are intended to be used for purposes that violate our terms of service, such as spamming. As of June 30, 2012, we estimate user-misclassified accounts may have represented approximately 2.4 percent of our worldwide MAUs and undesirable accounts may have represented approximately 1.5 percent of our worldwide MAUs.

Source: CNET