None of Your Facebook Friends Are Real

The next time you start talking to a stranger on Facebook, you might want to break out the Turing test. Mashable reports:

The number of fake accounts on Facebook is roughly the size of Egypt's population and larger than most of the world's countries, the company disclosed this week. In a 10-Q filing, Facebook acknowledged that a total of 8.7%—or 83 million—accounts on the network are bogus. Of that 8.7%, 4.8% are duplicate accounts, 2.4% are user-misclassified accounts and 1.5% are "undesirable" accounts, a.k.a. spam.

In the 2008 elections, by contrast, the winning candidate received a little less than 67 million votes. If those social-media ghosts get organized, they could crush us like bugs.

#SocialMedia #Facebook