Social networking site Facebook said the website may have over 100 million ‘duplicate’ accounts, and their percentage being higher in developing markets such as India, besides 5 to 15 million ‘undesirable’ accounts registered with it worldwide, as per company’s estimations.
“There may be individuals who maintain one or more Facebook accounts in violation of our terms of service. We estimate, for example, that ‘duplicate’ accounts (an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account) may have represented between approximately 4.3 per cent and 7.9 per cent of our worldwide MAUs (Monthly Active User) in 2013,” Facebook said in the SEC filing.
According to the latest quarterly report, Facebook said the percentage of duplicate or false accounts is higher in developing markets such as India and Turkey. As of March 31, 2014, the site had 1.28 billion MAUs, an increase of 15 per cent from last March 31. Users in India and Brazil represented key sources of growth in the first quarter of 2014 relative to the same period in 2013, the filing with SEC said.
“In 2013, for example, we estimate user-misclassified accounts may have represented between approximately 0.8 per cent and 2.1 per cent of our worldwide MAUs and undesirable accounts may have represented between approximately 0.4 per cent and 1.2 per cent of our worldwide MAUs,” it further said.
User-misclassified accounts, are the profiles created by users for a business, organisation, or non-human entity such as a pet while undesirable accounts, are user profiles that are intended to be used for purposes that violate terms of service, such as spamming.
Facebook further said the estimations of duplicate or false accounts ‘may not’ accurately represent the actual number of such accounts and the social website is continually seeking to improve ability to identify duplicate or false accounts and estimate the total number of such accounts. Worldwide mobile MAUs increased 34 per cent to 1.01 billion as of March 31, 2014 from 751 million as of March 31, 2013.