>"These are very legitimate use of a social networking platform." I have many friends (not strippers, unfortunately) who are active on the site with completely

>"These are very legitimate use of a social networking platform." I have many friends (not strippers, unfortunately) who are active on the site with completely fraudulent personal information. The problem isn't that the accounts are inactive. The problem is that businesses are buying ad-space based on the data produced by these "fake" accounts. When my 30 year-old female friends from Canada are generating data as 65 year old, married men from Wisconsin, someone trying to advertise to those men is going to get a raw deal. >"It would be a mistake for Facebook to target such accounts and close them down." Facebook won't close them down, both for the reasons you mention (these are real, active users) as well the fact that it's important for them to be able to boast about user figures. If the published number is 83MM, my bet is the reality is higher.