83 Million Facebook Accounts are Illegitimate

By | 3 August, 2012

Facebook has recently come under scrutiny for the quality of clicks ensuing from its advertising platform. Advertisers have complained against fake clicks, which charge the advertiser, but don’t really result in good leads. While there are success stories from businesses running ads on Facebook, it seems a big number of users are illegitimate.

In SEC filings submitted this week, Facebook says 83 million of its 955 million user accounts — or 8.7% of the total population —  do not conform to the terms of service. These duplicates, non-human entities or misclassified accounts.

  • Duplicate profiles: 4.8%
  • Misclassified accounts: 2.4%
  • Undesirable accounts: 1.5%

The presence of these undesirable accounts can hurt the social network’s business model, says a recent filing. “The loss of advertisers, or reduction in spending by advertisers with Facebook, could seriously harm our business.”

Given the potential for fake accounts, fake likes and low-quality traffic, the social network says they are looking into the issue to minimize spamming and the use of bots for clicking ads.



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