In company filings published this week, Facebok 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”, Channeltv.com reported.


The estimate came at a time of growing concern about the value of marketing on the platform.
In total, the company said it estimated there were 83.09 million fake users, which it classified in three groups.


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.