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London: Social network
Facebook has said there are now more than 83 million fake users on
the website, BBC reported Thursday.
The company said 8.7 percent of its 955 million active users might
not be real.
Duplicate profiles made up 4.8 percent of the users while 1.5
percent of users were described as "undesirable".
In total, the company said it estimated there were 83.09 million
fake users, which it classified in three groups.
The largest group of "fakes" were duplicates, which the company
defined as "an account that a user maintains in addition to his or
her principal account".
Others were described as "user-misclassified" where, Facebook
explained "users have created personal profiles for a business,
organisation, or non-human entity such as a pet".
Finally, "undesirable" accounts were profiles deemed to be in
breach of Facebook's terms of service. This meant profiles which
have been used for sending out spam messages or other content, BBC
said.
A BBC investigation, in which a fake company called VirtualBagel
was set up to investigate allegations of fake "likes", found that
the large majority of "likes" for the fake firm originated from
the Middle East and Asia.
Many users appeared to be false, such as "Ahmed Ronaldo" - said to
be a Cairo-based user employed by Spanish football club Real
Madrid.
Digital distribution firm Limited Press alleged that, based on its
own analytics software, 80 percent of clicks on its advertisements
within Facebook had come from fake users.
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