Fake accounts may be higher in countries like the Philippines

While Facebook boasts around 2.07 billion users around the world, around 10% of that number may be duplicate accounts, while around 2% to 3%  may be false accounts. That’s according to the social media giant themselves, which published the revelation along with their Q3 2017 earnings report a few days ago.

Going by Facebook’s estimates, there’s at least 200 million users in Facebook that have duplicate accounts, meaning, secondary accounts that a user maintains in addition to their main account. False accounts, which Facebook classifies as user-misclassified accounts (personal profiles for a business, organization or non-human entity) and undesirable accounts, which are “intended to be used for purposes that violate [Facebook’s] terms of service such as spamming,” number at least 60 million.

While this represents an increase from Facebook’s July report for Q2 2017, the social media giant says that there isn’t an actual surge of these types of users on their platform. Instead, Facebook has gotten better at detecting fake and duplicate accounts using a new methodology.

Interestingly, Facebook notes that a large concentration of these fake and duplicate accounts are located in developing markets like the Philippines.

“We also believe the percentage of duplicate accounts is meaningfully higher in developing markets such as India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, as compared to more developed markets,” said Facebook.