8.7 percent of Facebook users are not real people: Here’s the breakdown

Facebook’s latest quarterly SEC Filing has been posted online. That may sound like a boring proposition, but a new freelance writer at CNET actually read it and discovered that a notable portion of Facebook’s 955 million users aren’t, well… real people. 8.7 percent, or 83 million of the social network’s monthly active users are fake or mislabeled accounts, it estimates.

Here’s the breakdown of Facebook’s users:

• 4.8 percent (46 million) of active users are duplicate accounts
• 2.4 percent (23 million) are misclassified, like a family dog or a business posing as a person
• 1.5 percent (14 million) are spammers and other bad people
• 57 percent (543 million) users accessed Facebook from a mobile device in June

When Facebook first filed for its Initial Public Offering a few months ago, it estimated that the number of fake accounts stood at only around 6 percent, but must have developed more precise algorithms (or gotten more honest) since. Some gaming and forgeries are to be expected, but 10 percent does sound like a high number of fake accounts.

We’ve seen an uptick in updates from Pages filtering into our newsfeed, but haven’t noticed a huge spam or duplicate account problem. What do you think? Have fake accounts been contacting you lately?