"The clicks are coming from inside your social network!" (Photo: Know Your Meme)

Perhaps you are friends with one. It sits unread in your collection of friends and family. It may seem pretty innocuous, it may purport to speak for someone's new dog or kitten or even their newborn baby. We're talking about one of Facebook's 83 million phony profiles. The BBC points us to Facebook's SEC filing, which says these accounts are unwanted, no matter how precious:

We also seek to identify "false" accounts, which we divide into two categories: (1) user-misclassified accounts, where users have created personal profiles for a business, organization, or non-human entity such as a pet (such entities are permitted on Facebook using a Page rather than a personal profile under our terms of service); and (2) undesirable accounts, which represent user profiles that we determine are intended to be used for purposes that violate our terms of service, such as spamming.

The general concern for the social networking giant is the presence of fake profiles may lead to losing advertisers and support accusations of bots generating fake clicks on ads, which helped drive Limited Run (formerly Limited Pressing) off the site last week.

Facebook's concerns include profiles that should be pages,  so don't worry--the page for Zuck's dog Beast is safe.