The great Facebook purge: Social network begins clearing out the 80million fake profiles which make up 10% of all users
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Published: 16:17 GMT, 27 September 2012 | Updated: 16:17 GMT, 27 September 2012












Facebook has begun deleting the 80million fake profiles which make up around 8.7 per cent of the social network site's users.

The news that so many accounts were fake shocked investors - sending Facebook's shares down to below the $20 mark when it was announced in August.

But Facebook is cleaning up its site to make it more attractive to advertisers, who will want to be targeting genuine users rather than accounts used either for spam, marketing, stalking or other false purposes.

However if you set up a profile for your pet, it may be about to vanish.

Probably real: Mark Zuckerberg announced the purge in order to remove fake users from the biggest social network

Meanwhile, if you run a group, a business or a band, and keep a close eye on your 'Likes', do not be too alarmed if they drop.

Popular games such as Zynga's Texas HoldEm Poker software online game lost around 96,000 fans, while Justin Bieber, South Park, Eminem and Rihanna also took drops 'in the tens of thousands', according to Techcrunch.

However, if you have set up an account for your pet, it is possible these will get deleted as well.

The astonishing figure makes up 8.7% of all Facebook's 995 million active users.

The true scale of the problem was hidden in a company filing published in August, the first since the firm went public.


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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'.

There were 83.09 million fake users in total, which Facebook classified in three groups.

The largest group were duplicate accounts, such as those set up by people to keep their activities from their partner.

The firm defined them as 'an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account.'

Others imaginary users were described as 'user-misclassified' where, Facebook said 'users have created personal profiles for a business, organisation, or non-human entity such as a pet'.

There were also a large number of 'undesirable' accounts were profiles deemed to be in breach of Facebook's terms of service.




These accounts were believed to have been set up to send out junk email messages.