(Newser)
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Obviously, Facebook has a lot of users. But how many of them are real? The company's quarterly earnings report, issued last week, revealed that the answer is most, but not as many as previously believed. About 8.7% of Facebook accounts, or around 83.09 million, are bogus, the company estimates. That, CNET points out, is a lot higher than the 5% to 6% Facebook said were fake in March, before its IPO. CNET attributes the jump to improved transparency on Facebook's part. It now breaks down the fakers as such:
- About 4.8% are "duplicate" accounts, meaning an account a user maintains in addition to his principal one.
- About 2.4% are "user-misclassified," meaning that a business or other organization has been given an account as though they were a person.
- About 1.5% are "undesirable," meaning they exist to generate spam or are otherwise up to no good.
