Takes on a new meaning here. (Photo: Pc1news.com)

Just as the social networking monolith hits a landmark 1 billion users, Facebook has had to admit it really does have a fake "like" problem. The fake clicks may well be hardwired into Facebook's architecture at the moment, based on discoveries about the nature of false clicks. The BBC reports:

A US security researcher found that simply sending a web address to a friend using Facebook's private messaging function would add two likes to that page.

Leaving a comment on a story within Facebook also adds to the tally.

Facebook told the BBC that the problem was due to a "bug" in social plug-ins that sometimes automatically inflates counts of shares and likes. Facebook was quick to deny the fake votes compromised any personal user information and the BBC reported it also denied that the site's overall total of 1.13 trillion likes was affected by the problem.

One of the best questions any researcher has asked about the issue came from an expert interviewed by the BBC, who wondered, "What else is being done automatically that we don't know about?"

As a recent social media panic demonstrated, that question may frequently occur in some form to a large percentage of Facebook's massive user base.

"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.