Facebook Is Disabling Billions Of Fake Accounts

Last week, Facebook published its third Community Standards Enforcement Report which shows the efforts the company is making to curb and remove controversial content. Between October 2018 and March 2019, Facebook said it removed 3.39 billion fake accounts, twice the number detected and removed in the previous six-month period. It is also more than a billion more than the 2.37 billion people who actively use Facebook each month.

Facebook said that the rise in fake accounts is due to an increasing number of attacks by bad actors who are setting up large volumes of accounts at once. They were detected through a combination of artificial intelligence and human monitoring with the vast majority of fake accounts disabled within minutes of their creation. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told journalists that the report shows the company is making progress in areas like hate speech and graphic violence, remarking that "we're increasingly catching it before people report it to us". Zuckerberg still acknowledged that there's a lot of work ahead regarding content issues.