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Almost 270 million users are ‘illegitimate’, says Facebook

Social media giant Facebook released it’s third quarter earning, however buried in that data, the company has accepted that there are almost 270 million fake accounts on their platform.

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 per cent of its accounts are duplicates of real users, almost doubling its estimate of six per cent from last quarter’s results, suggesting that in total, up to 13 per cent 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 scanner after it revealed that the Russian content on its platforms reached more users than reported earlier.

According to a report in The Washington Post in October, Facebook was planning to tell lawmakers that 126 million of its users might have seen content produced and circulated by Russian operatives — many times more than the company had previously disclosed about their reach.

Facebook had previously reported that nearly 10 million users had seen those ads.

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