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.
"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.
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