83 Million Facebook Accounts Are Fake. Really, That Few?

This week a shocking discovery was made: Not nearly as many Facebook accounts are as fake as you think. Only 83 million accounts, according to the House of Zuck, are made up. Needless to say, they still want to close all of them.

In an updated regulatory filing released Wednesday, the social media company said that 8.7 percent of its 955 million monthly active users worldwide are actually duplicate or false accounts.

“On Facebook we have a really large commitment in general to finding and disabling false accounts,” Facebook’s chief security officer Joe Sullivan told CNN in a recent interview. “Our entire platform is based on people using their real identities.”

“So we can sell that information to advertisers,” Sullivan muttered under his breath.

Leaving aside Abby Farle, most of them exist not because of what you’d think but because people are stupid. 45.8 million of these accounts, yes, the majority, are duplicates.

Usually these accounts are made to help other people, like your grandmother, actually get on Facebook, made as a joke, or made by annoying parents who have to fling their offspring into social networking for some stupid reason.

Of the remaining accounts, most of the rest are simply profiles opened by small businesses or “personalities” that wanted to start a Page and screwed up. Amazingly, there are just 14 million spam accounts on Facebook.

So, no, that guy currently insisting that Chick-Fil-A is doing God’s work is probably not fake. Probably.

image courtesy the Dughouse on Flickr

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