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Facebook has confirmed that up to 83 million profiles on the world’s largest social network are believed to be fake.

The BBC reports a recent Facebook company filing as saying that 8.7% of the firm’s 955m worldwide users may not be legitimate.

It was revealed that 4.8% of the suspected profiles were outright fakes, while 2.4% were misclassified accounts – essentially users who have created profiles “for a business, organisation, or non-human entity such as a pet”.

However, 1.5% were put in a category labelled “undesirable” – profiles that have been deemed to be in breach of Facebook’s terms of service, such as spammers.

In total, the listed company believes that there could be 83.09 million fake users of the site.

The revelation, held the Risks category of Facebook’s results report, comes at a time when companies are increasingly doubting Facebook’s value as an advertising platform.

Facebook fake accounts

The business relies almost solely on online and targeted advertising for its revenue, with a major lure for brands being the process of users ‘liking’ their pages – meaning they can post promotions in their status updates.

However, a recent BBC investigation revealed that the value of ‘likes’ may be inflated by fake profiles sometimes ‘liking’ thousands of different products with seemingly little value.

Last week, a digital distribution firm called Limited Press claimed that its own analytics had suggested that 80% of clicks on its Facebook ads had come from fake profiles.

In a post on its own Facebook page, Limited Press said: “Bots were loading pages and driving up our advertising costs. So we tried contacting Facebook about this. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t reply.

“Do we know who the bots belong too [sic]? No. Are we accusing Facebook of using bots to drive up advertising revenue. No. Is it strange? Yes.”

Facebook acknowledged the risk of advertisers growing sceptical in its filing, saying: “We generate a substantial majority of our revenue from advertising.

“The loss of advertisers, or reduction in spending by advertisers with Facebook, could seriously harm our business.”

digitalspy.co.uk