Facebook aware of 270 mn fake accounts

The disclosure could lead to increased scrutiny of the social network.

LONDON: Already under lens for its role in Russia’s meddling into the 2016 US eelction, Facebook has admitted that up to 270 million accounts on the platform are either fake or duplicate.

The social media giant this week released its third quarter earning and buried in those results, it disclosed that there are tens of millions more fake and duplicate accounts than it had previously thought, The Telegraph reported on Saturday.

Around two-to-three per cent of its 2.1 billion monthly users in the third quarter of 2017 were “user- misclassified and undesirable accounts”, Facebook said, adding the number were up from the one per cent it had estimated in July.

Another 10% of its accounts are duplicates of real users, almost doubling its estimate of 6% from last quarter’s results, suggesting that in total, up to 13% of its 2.1 billion monthly users (almost 270 million accounts) are “illegitimate”.

The company said that improvements to the data used to identify fake accounts was behind the increase, rather than a sudden surge in fake users, the report pointed out.

The disclosure could lead to increased scrutiny of the social network that is already under scrutiny after it revealed that the Russian content on its platforms reached more users than reported earlier.