This Year Facebook Deleted More Than 1.5 Billion Fake Accounts

Until now, Facebook is still the largest social networking platform in the world. At least 1.5 billion users communicate with each other on Facebook every day. This number certainly defeats other social network active users. Facebook's commitment to becoming a safe platform makes it reluctant to take firm action against negative content that violates the rules. One of them is by removing the content to temporarily disable the account. Facebook's Product Management VP Guy Rosen, said it often gets questions about how Facebook decides what is allowed to be present on its platform.

This report was compiled between October 2017 and March 2018. There are six regulated areas, namely related to graphic violence, adult nudity, and sexual activity, terrorist propaganda, utterances of hatred, spam, and fake accounts. To clear the platform of these inappropriate content, Facebook relies on artificial intelligence (AI) technology. In fact, Facebook has succeeded in removing tens of millions of negative content to hundreds of millions of fake accounts on its platform. Dave Geraghty, as the Director of Global Operations for Facebook, said this was a real step for Facebook's seriousness in minimizing negative influences on its users.

Last week Facebook also announced that it had removed 12 million terrorism content from its platform. That number rose significantly from only 3 million content in the previous semester. The announcement of removing the negative content was conveyed Facebook a day after The New York Times reported on the struggle in the top officials of Facebook in driving out negative news about the social media company. The report, among others, mentions how Facebook hired a public relations company in the US to vilify the names of competing companies like Apple and Google.

In the period between April and September this year, Facebook stopped about 1.5 billion fake accounts from its network and removed 2.1 billion spam.  Facebook reports surprising numbers in its Community Standards Report. This report describes how Facebook has handled issues such as adult nudity, hate speech, terrorist propaganda, violent content and graphics, and fake accounts.  According to Facebook, many fake accounts are a direct result of cyber attacks. 

Facebook also dropped 21 million pieces of adult nudity and sexual activity in the first quarter, of which 96% were found and marked by AI technology before users reported it. Rosen estimates that every 10 thousand content seen on Facebook, 7-9 views are content that violates regulated pornography and adult nudity standards. Facebook also helped remove 3.5 million violent content, 86% of which had been identified before being reported. As to discourse, the organization driven by Mark Zuckerberg has diminished 2.5 million substance amid the initial three months of 2018, of which 38% have been set apart by innovation.

This social network claims to be far better at recognizing and preventing infringing content even before the content is seen by people and reporting it. According to Facebook, 95.9% of the infringing content has been handled before being reported. Facebook is still being watched over for false news propaganda, also criticized for recent security violations, which affected 50 million accounts.

Facebook has recorded as many as 583 million fake accounts and 837 million spam content. Not enough to get there, Facebook also revoked 21 million pornographic uploads and photos showing sexual activity. 96% of them have already been detected by the Facebook security algorithm system before other users report it. No less important, various utterances of hate and propaganda of terrorism have also been the focus of Facebook. More than 1.9 million uploads of terrorism propaganda were detected by 99.5% of the machines before being reported by other users. While 2.5 million speeches of hate were also successfully revoked but only with 38% accuracy.

Facebook is also increasingly making efforts to block negatively at the request of the government of a country. Among the negative content, Facebook has so far carried out the most blocking in India. Not only that, but a group of NGOs engaged in the field of human rights also asked Facebook to release data on how often to recover content that was deleted due to an error. Currently, Facebook has not provided the requested data, but the company is said to offer more open offer information than last year.

This is because various expressions of hatred are a little difficult to detect by the scanning machine. Therefore, besides utilizing machines, Facebook also works with teams from various parts of the world to distinguish user-written content in various languages.

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