Facebook has more than 83 million 'fake' users

Advertising is Facebook's main revenue stream

Facebook has revealed that it believes there are about 83.09 million fake users on the social network.

In company filings published this week, it said 8.7% of its 955 million active users might not be real.

Duplicate profiles made up 4.8% of the fakes, user-misclassified accounts amounted to 2.4%, and 1.5% of users were described as "undesirable".


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."

Others were described as "user-misclassified" where, Facebook explained "users have created personal profiles for a business, organisation, or non-human entity such as a pet".

Finally, "undesirable" accounts were profiles deemed to be in breach of Facebook's terms of service. Typically, this means profiles which have been used for sending out spam messages or other content.


The estimate came at a time of growing concern about the value of marketing on the platform and is coming under increased scrutiny over the worth of its advertising model which promotes the gathering of "likes" from users.