Facebook admits it has 83 million fake accounts

SOCIAL NETWORK Facebook has admitted that it has around 83 million fake accounts, nearly 10 per cent of its user base, in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The 10-Q filing reveals that the firm is aware of a large number of accounts on the web site that shouldn't be there, with 4.8 per cent of users having "duplicate accounts" that are not allowed under the terms and conditions of the service.

Beyond that, there are around 2.4 per cent "user-misclassified accounts", where users have created "personal profiles for a business, organisation, or non-human entity such as a pet", which are meant to be hosted under its Pages section.

In addition, some 1.5 per cent of users or about 10 million accounts are "undesirable", which means user profiles that "are intended to be used for purposes that violate our terms of service, such as spamming", the firm explains in the filing.

Adding these percentages up and applying them to the last reported user base of 901 million means there are around 83 million fake accounts in total on the web site.

The revelations are yet more bad news for the Facebook as it tries to increase its advertising revenues and grow its share price after a disappointing initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq stock market in May, followed by recent suggestions that it is engaging in click-fraud.

The report comes a week after the firm posted its first public earnings, which revealed a loss of $157m for the quarter, sending its share price plummeting by almost 10 per cent to its lowest price since it hit the market in May.

The firm's share price is hovering just above $20, little more than half its IPO price of $38. µ

This article was originally published on V3.