Facebook Gets Rid Of 37% Of “Undesirable Accounts”
You might be getting fewer suspicious friend requests from bikini-clad babes in the future. In their latest quarterly earnings release, Facebook disclosed recently that they rid the social network of an estimated 37% of spammer accounts at the end of 2012.
Facebook caught criticism last summer for revealing that an estimated 8.7% of its then-955 million monthly users were accounts that violated the site’s terms of service. While many of these are spammers, it also includes users with more than one account, those who use a fake name for any reason, and accounts created for non-humans like pets or businesses. Parents’ accounts for children are technically not allowed, and neither are accounts for anyone under the age of 13.
Fan Pages can be created instead for beloved animals or organizations.
The fakes hurt Facebook, which frequently cites it’s millions (now billion) of regular users as evidence of its popularity- and justification to charge advertisers the going rates.
TechCrunch reports that Facebook has a dedicated anti-spammer team working on the problem, even going “undercover” in spammer forums to learn their methods and weed out fake accounts.
What do you think? Is spam hurting your user experience on Facebook?
