Facebook Begins Deleting Fake User Accounts and Fake Likes

In a roundabout sort of way, Facebook tattled on itself earlier in the summer when, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it fessed up to the fact that nearly 9 percent of the social networking site's accounts are fake, bogus, the unreal McCoy. Or, as Facebook labeled them, "undesirable" or "false" accounts, which are those that belong to spammers or "where users have created personal profiles for a business, organization, or non-human entity such as a pet." Let the clean-up act begin.

As promised, Facebook has started deleting fake accounts and Page Likes. In a Facebook Security blog post last month, the site said it would soon be purging certain accounts and Likes in order to improve the integrity of the social networking service, a move that was expected to affect, on average, less than 1 percent of Likes on any given Page. For some, that adds up to a lot of Likes.

Source: PageData

Zynga's Texas HoldEm Poker, for example, was purged of over 100,000 Likes since yesterday, though it still has more than 65 million Likes and didn't budge as the third most popular Page on Facebook. Others have lost thousands and tens of thousands of Likes, all in a single day.

Most of you won't be affected by this, but if you setup an account for Fido, your adorable Welsh Terrier who has much to share with the world, you might want to keep an eye on it for the next few days. Depending on how aggressive Facebook is on its crackdown of fake accounts, little Fido's account could end up euthanized.