Hi all users, it's needless to say that Facebook has close to one billion active users at this point. That's quite a figure, even if growth has slowed down in recent years. The impressive thing is that these are active users, i.e. those that log in once a month, not profiles that people have created and abandoned.
Even more impressive, more than half of those log in every day. But it's not all rainbows and sunshine, 8.7 percent of the monthly active users belong to fake accounts, Facebook estimates in a SEC filing.
Facebook labels fake accounts as either duplicates, i.e. one user having more than one profile on the site, misclassified accounts and "undesirables," i.e. spam accounts.
8.7 percent of active users on Facebook amount to 83.09 million accounts, which is no small figure. 83 million users in total would be an enviable amount for any number of sites.
4.8 percent of the total number of accounts are duplicate accounts. Everyone knows someone that has more than one account so this is hardly surprising.
While having more than one "personal" account is against Facebook's terms of service and you risk having one or both suspended, Facebook is turning the other way in most of these cases, unless there is a specific reason to intervene, like harassment and so on.
2.4 percent of active users, on the other hand, have legitimate accounts, i.e. they're not duplicates, but they're not for themselves either. This could be a small businesses creating a profile rather than a page or someone creating an account for their pets.
Finally, 1.5 percent of active accounts have been labeled by Facebook as "undesirable." These are fake accounts used for spam, phishing, spreading malware, gaming app usage stats and any number of other activities prohibited by the Facebook terms of service.
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