If you're using a fake name
on your Facebook account, maintaining a personal profile for
your beloved pet or have a second profile you use just for
logging in to other sites, you have one of the 83.09 million
fake accounts Facebook wants to disable.
In an updated regulatory filing released
Wednesday, the social media company said that 8.7 percent of its
955 million monthly active users worldwide are actually
duplicate or false accounts.
"On Facebook we have a really large commitment in
general to finding and disabling false accounts," Facebook's
chief security officer Joe Sullivan told CNN in a recent
interview. "Our entire platform is based on people using their
real identities."
So
what are those 83 million undesired accounts doing? They're a
mixture of innocent and malicious, and Facebook has divvied them
up into three categories: duplicate accounts, misclassified
accounts and "undesirable" accounts.
\Duplicate accounts make up 4.8% (45.8 million)
of Facebook's total active member tally. According to the
network's terms of service, users are not allowed to have more
than one Facebook personal account or make accounts on behalf of
other people. Parents creating Facebook accounts for their young
kids are violating two rules, since people under 13 are not
allowed to have Facebook profiles.
Misclassified accounts are personal profiles that
have been made for companies, groups or pets. Those types of
profiles (22.9 million) are allowed on Facebook, but they need
to be created as Pages. Facebook estimates that 2.4% of its
active accounts are these non-human personal accounts. These
accounts can be converted into approved pages without losing
information. Pets such as Boo, the self-anointed "world's cutest
dog," are typically classified as Public Figures.
The third group is the smallest -- just 1.5% of
all active accounts -- but most troublesome. There are 14.3
million undesirable accounts that Facebook believes have been
created specifically for purposes that violate the companies
terms, like spamming.
Face it, Facebook: Sometimes you suck
"We believe the percentage of accounts that are
duplicate or false is meaningfully lower in developed markets
such as the United States or Australia and higher in developing
markets such as Indonesia and Turkey," the company said in the
filing. The tallies were based on an internal sampling of
accounts done by reviewers, and Facebook says the numbers may
represent the actual number.
Facebook disables any false accounts it finds,
and while it wipes all the information associated with the name
from public view, it doesn't delete the account from its servers
"for safety and security" reasons. The disabled account goes
into a sort of Facebook limbo, where the owner of the account
can't get their hands on any of the content -- photos, posts,
videos -- not even by requesting a copy of the data, according
to Facebook.
If
Facebook does shut down your account, it says you can't create a
new one without permission from the company.
