Facebook Has Already Taken Down 5.4 Billion Fake Accounts So Far This Year

Last November 13, Facebook released its transparency report including the removal of harmful content like fake accounts, hate speech, and pieces of child exploitation. It stated an increase in numbers for all three classifications of content, which Mark Zuckerberg uses to show that Facebook is genuinely invested in improving the landscape of social media.

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According to the report, a total of 5.4 billion fake accounts have been shut down on its main platform for these 11 months of 2019. This is already 2 billion more than the 3.3 billion fake accounts shut down in the entire 2018. Still, the report highlights that roughly 5% of its monthly user base of nearly 2.5 billion consists of fake accounts meaning the challenge very much remains.

In terms of hate speech, as many as 7 million pieces of hate speech content have been taken down from July to September alone. This 3-month period showed a 60% increase of removed content compared to that of April to June. And Facebook even says that 80% of these 7 million pieces were removed before a single user was able to view it, thanks to detective algorithms.

Another 11.6 million pieces which are exploitative of children were similarly pulled down from the site during the July-September period. Content involved with child nudity and child sexual exploitation was dealt with zero tolerance, which could be why these numbers are up 5.8 million from the first quarter of the year.