Facebook admits 83 million profiles are fake

Facebook has announced that 8.7% of its 955m global users are duplicate accounts. A large proportion of those being pages created for pets and those designed for spam.

In March, when Facebook last gave an estimate of the number of fake or duplicate accounts, it said the proportion was in the region of 5% or 6%, which at the time meant between 42m and 50m.

The admission comes at a difficult time for Facebook as it tries to convince investors it can raise sufficient revenue through advertising – especially in the face of reports from Limited Run last week, which claimed that 80% of clicks on ads on the social networking site came from “bots”, or fake users.

For the full Guardian article click here.