Your trusted source

Facebook revealed today there are now more than 83 million fake users on its social network.

According to Daily Mail, the astonishing figure makes up 8.7% of all Facebook's 995 million active users.

The true scale of the problem was hidden in a company filing published this week, the first since the firm went public.

Duplicate profiles made up 4.8% of the fakes, user-misclassified accounts amounted to 2.4%, and 1.5% of users were described as 'undesirable'.

There were 83.09 million fake users in total, which Facebook classified in three groups.

The largest group were duplicate accounts, such as those set up by people to keep their activities from their partner.

The firm defined them as 'an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account.'

Others imaginary users were described as 'user-misclassified' where, Facebook said 'users have created personal profiles for a business, organisation, or non-human entity such as a pet'.

Users have created pages for cats, dogs and other animals.

There were also a large number of 'undesirable' accounts were profiles deemed to be in breach of Facebook's terms of service.

These accounts were believed to have been set up to send out junk email messages.

The admission comes as Facebook is attempting to recover from a shambolic public offering.

It now hopes to make money by persuading firms to set up brand pages - but the sheer number of fake users could harm this approach and make the public wary of pages.

A BBC investigation last month concluded that a rash of fake profiles was a major cause for concern for Facebook advertisers, although the firm told the BBC it had 'not seen evidence of a significant problem.'

The BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones set up a fake company called VirtualBagel to investigate allegations of fake 'likes'.

His investigation found that the large majority of 'likes' for the fake firm originated from the Middle East and Asia.