270 million accounts on Facebook are fake or duplicate: report

Tainted with allegations of Russian involvement and its role in US elections, Facebook has now admitted that up to 270 million accounts on the platform are either fake or duplicate.

The social media giant, in its third quarter report disclosed that there are tens of millions more fake and duplicate accounts than it had previously thought, UK media reported.

Around two-to-three per cent of its 2.1 billion monthly users in the third quarter of 2017 were “user-misclassified and undesirable accounts”, Facebook said, adding the number were up from the one per cent it had estimated in July.

The disclosure could lead to more scrutiny and demand of openness of the data by the users and digital rights activists.