Some top Facebook pages lost tens of thousands of Likes today as a result of Facebook’s attempt to eliminate false accounts and improve site integrity.

Last month the social network announced it would remove Likes obtained through malware, compromised accounts, deceived users or purchased bulk Likes. It seems a major component of this was pushed today, as many pages saw their daily new Likes dip into negative territory today, and other top growing pages experienced a lower new Like count than normal. This was first reported by TechCrunch, which discovered the change using our PageData tracking service.

Overall, page owners will benefit from this update, even if it means their fan counts are a bit lower. Facebook has said the update will, on average, remove less than 1 percent of a page’s Likes. The change will help page owners better reach the audience that matters and prevent them from being deceived by metrics that might be skewed by false accounts.

It’s unclear how the change will be reflected in Facebook Insights, which are currently two days behind for new Likes and unlikes. Page owners can visit our PageData to understand how their fan totals have been affected and how that compares to other pages of similar sizes and industries. For example, below are the stats for the InsideFacebook.com page, which shows new Likes per day in blue. We have lost seven fans since yesterday as a result of the change.