Facebook recently filed its 10-Q report for its quarterly period that ended last June 30, 2012. Apart from the company’s performance, the comprehensive report also revealed a staggering number of fake accounts. The social network said that out of its 955 million active users around the world, about 8.7 percent of them might be fake or bogus. Facebook explained that of the 8.7 percent, 4.8 percent of the users are duplicate accounts, 2.4 percent of them are user-misclassified accounts, and the remaining 1.5 percent are “undesirable” accounts, or what we call as spam. If you’ll do the math, the estimated number of fake accounts on Facebook will amount to a total number of 83.09 million 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% 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.
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