Facebook: 76 million accounts were fake last year
All those pet cat profiles add up: Facebook has reported
that roughly 76 million of the 1.06 billion user accounts on its social network
are bogus in some way or other.
The company identifies three types of accounts that don't
represent actual users: duplicate accounts, misclassified accounts and
undesirable accounts. Together, they added up to just over 7 percent of its
worldwide monthly active users last year.
Facebook disclosed the figures in its annual report filed
with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission on Friday.
Duplicate accounts, or those maintained by people in
addition to their principal account, represent 53 million accounts, or 5
percent of the total, Facebook said.
Misclassified accounts, including those created for
non-human entities such as pets or organizations, which instead should have
Facebook Pages, accounted for almost 14 million accounts, or 1.3 percent of the
total.
And undesirable accounts, such as those created by
spammers, rounded out the tally with 9.5 million accounts, or 0.9 percent of
users.
Facebook said it continually tries to improve its ability
to identify these duplicate or false accounts. It also noted that there's a
higher percentage of such accounts in developing countries such as Indonesia
and Turkey, compared to developed markets like the U.S. and Australia.
Using a fake name is against Facebook's policies and it
encourages users to report friends who use false names or set up fake accounts.
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