Facebook has over 83 million fake accounts

Facebook last week announced its first set of numbers as a public company, and with it came the news that the number of users who access the site is inching closer to 1 billion.

The company said it had 955 million active monthly users as of June 30, up 29 percent from a year earlier. Facebook also released some interesting statistics about "fake accounts". The company estimates that as many as 8.7 percent of those accounts, or a tad over 83 million, are fake.

Facebook further breaks these accounts into what it calls "duplicate" accounts and "false" accounts. Duplicate accounts are the ones that users maintain in addition to their principal account. False accounts are further categorised into two - user-misclassified accounts and undesirable accounts.

User-misclassified accounts are ones where users have created personal profiles for a business, organisation, or non-human entity such as a pet. These entities are allowed to exist on Facebook, but as a Page, not as individual accounts. Undesirable accounts, on the other hand, are ones that Facebook believes "are intended to be used for purposes that violate our terms of service, such as spamming".

Facebook says around 46 million accounts are duplicate, while the number of user-misclassified and undesirable accounts stand at 23 million and 14 million respectively, bringing the total to 83 million fake accounts.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company posted a loss of $157 million, or 8 cents per share in the April-June period, mainly due to compensation expenses it incurred when it paid $1.3 billion in restricted stock and related taxes for employees as part of the IPO.

The results come two months after Facebook's stock flopped on its first trading day, on May 18. The day began with glitches with the Nasdaq stock market that delayed trading by half an hour. It didn't get much better from there. Despite months of hoopla that had investors thinking it would soar, the stock closed just 23 cents above its $38 IPO price. It has not reached that level since.

With inputs from AP