Facebook Removes a Record 2.2 Billion Fake Accounts

Facebook Removes a Record 2.2 Billion Fake Accounts
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Facebook said it removed 2.2 billion fake accounts in the first quarter, according to Bloomberg. The record shows how the company is battling an avalanche of bad actors trying to undermine the authenticity of the world’s largest social network.

In the final quarter of 2018, Facebook disabled just more than 1 billion fake accounts and 583 million in the first quarter of last year. The vast majority are removed within minutes of being created, the company said, so they’re not counted in Facebook’s closely watched monthly and daily active user metrics.

“The larger quantities of fake accounts are driven by spammers who are constantly trying to evade our systems,“ Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, told reporters. Rosen didn’t attribute the spam accounts to any specific group or entity.

Facebook also shared a new metric. The number of posts removed that were promoting or engaging in drug and firearm sales. Facebook pulled more than 1.5 million posts from these categories in the first three months of this year, and said that it would eventually like to expand its report to include other types of illegal activity.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company has vastly increased its spending to police its products. “The amount of capital that we are able to invest in all of the safety systems that go into what we are talking about today, our budget in 2019 is greater than the whole revenue of our company in the year before we went public in 2012,“ he said.

Zuckerberg admitted the privacy push will have tradeoffs. “We recognize that it’s going to be harder to find all of the different types of harmful content. We’ll be fighting that battle without one of the very important tools, which is, of course, being able to look at the content itself. It’s not clear on a lot of these fronts that we’re going to be able to do as good of a job on identifying harmful content as we can today with that tool.“