Facebook is the largest social network which boats a massive user base of 955 million people. However, out of this huge user base, a significant amount of accounts are fake. Facebook has now admitted that out of its total registered accounts, about 8.7 percent accounts are fake.

Out of Facebook’s 955 million accounts, about 83.09 million Facebook accounts are fake. This is an astonishingly huge number, and has risen from 50.70 million fake users accounts on Facebook back in March this year.

Facebook has been devising new ways and methods to discern the fake accounts and make the whole process more transparent. It has also provided a more detailed view of these fake accounts. Among the total Facebook accounts- 4.8 percent are duplicate accounts, 2.4 percent are user-misclassified accounts and 1.5 percent are undesirable accounts.

Even now, Facebook warns that it may not be able to track all the fake or duplicate accounts, and that, with such a huge population, there is a lot of space to improve. According to the company, “The numbers of our MAUs and DAUs and ARPU are calculated using internal company data based on the activity of user accounts. While these numbers are based on what we believe to be reasonable estimates of our user base for the applicable period of measurement, there are inherent challenges in measuring usage of our products across large online and mobile populations around the world. For example, there may be individuals who maintain one or more Facebook accounts in violation of our terms of service, despite our efforts to detect and suppress such behavior.”

Explaining the terms user-misclassified accounts and undesirable accounts, Facebook elaborates, “We also seek to identify “false” accounts, which we divide into two categories: (1) user-misclassified accounts, where users have created personal profiles for a business, organization, or non-human entity such as a pet (such entities are permitted on Facebook using a Page rather than a personal profile under our terms of service); and (2) undesirable accounts, which represent user profiles that we determine are intended to be used for purposes that violate our terms of service, such as spamming. As of June 30, 2012, we estimate user-misclassified accounts may have represented approximately 2.4 percent of our worldwide MAUs and undesirable accounts may have represented approximately 1.5 percent of our worldwide MAUs.”

Courtesy: CNET