Facebook Deleted 1.5 billion Fake Accounts In Just Q2 and Q3 2018

Karamchand Rameshwar - Nov 20, 2018

Facebook deleted 1.5 billion fake accounts between April and September 2018 in attempt to fight hate speech, spam, terrorist propaganda and also fake news.

Facebook just released its Community Standards Enforcement Preliminary Report which detailed how the company enforces its own Community Standards, dealing with hate speech, spam, terrorist propaganda and also fake news on the platform. It revealed that it removed around 1.5 billion fake accounts from April to September 2018.

The number of fake accounts the giant social platform deleted were over 800 million and 754 million in Q2 and Q3 2018, respectively in comparison with 534 million in Q1. That can give you an idea of how widespread false content and accounts are on the platform.

Fake accounts deleted

Facebook said that:

According to the company, it has improved the algorithms to catch the fake accounts even before them being reported by users. The company stated that it could detect and delete 99.6 percent fake accounts in Q2 and Q3 2018 were largely thanks to AI.

It also claimed that in the same period, the company removed around 2.1 billion pieces of spam also.

Spam content deleted

Besides from dealing with spams, the social media giant also has a lot of other big issues to deal with. Its recent failure in dealing with fake political ads, especially the recent incident in which VICE News placed ads “paid for” by Mike Pence and ISIS - indicates that Facebook AI can still be fooled.

According to a report of the NYTimes, Facebook did not act fast enough to deal with the Russian actors’ attempts to interfere with the US elections. There were even conflicts in internal management due to this issue. But, Facebook denied this claim and stated that its CEO Zuckerberg and COO Sandberg were highly involved in fighting the fake news issues.

In another post, Facebook CEO said that abuse of service and fake news are like society crimes and those issues can only be controlled:

Facebook has recently tried even harder to protect its users from spreading any misinformation during US elections. And, in the US mid-term elections, the social networking giant eliminated over 100 pages and accounts from both Instagram and Facebook.

However, the two major incidents including the massive security breaches and also the Cambridge Analytica scandal, have reduced the company’s trust and reputation a lot. Facebook and its CEO will have to work really hard to rebuild its brand image.