Facebook has 8.7% 'FAKE' users

  
Facebook has confirmed that up to 83 million profiles on the world's largest social network are believed to be fake. 

The astonishing figure makes up 8.7% of all Facebook's 995 million active users.The true scale of the problem was hidden in a company filing published this week, the first since the firm went public.

It was revealed that 4.8% of the suspected profiles were outright fakes, while 2.4% were misclassified accounts - essentially users who have created profiles "for a business, organisation, or non-human entity such as a pet and  1.5% were put in a category labelled "undesirable" - profiles that have been deemed to be in breach of Facebook's terms of service, such as spammers.

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."

Facebook has also said that such accounts could have an adverse impact on the business of the company which may also result in reduction in spending by advertisers. The business relies almost solely on online and targeted advertising for its revenue, with a major lure for brands being the process of users 'liking' their pages - meaning they can post promotions in their status updates. 

The figures comes at a time when the company said it is investigating the reports in which Limited Run, a music start-up, said its Facebook ad purchase that amounted to 80 per cent clicks were made by bots, not real readers. The New-York based company also announced that it would soon be deactivating Facebook page due to ads clicked by automated computer programs.

Facebook, whose business model relies on targeted advertising, is coming under increased scrutiny over the worth of its advertising model which promotes the gathering of "likes" from users.

"We generate a substantial majority of our revenue from advertising," the company said in its filing.

"The loss of advertisers, or reduction in spending by advertisers with Facebook, could seriously harm our business."

They went on to say that most of these accounts originate from developing markets such as Indonesia and Turkey.