How Many Fake Accounts Are There on Facebook? Here's a Clue: 1.5 Billion Fake Accounts Were Removed in Just the Past 6 Months

There's been a lot of news reports over fake news and Russian interference of the elections on social media. And surely you've heard that there's a lot of fake accounts on Facebook. But exactly how many is a lot?

Engadget summarizes Facebook's latest transparency report, covering the first half of 2018:

... at a high level Facebook says it removed over 1.5 billion fake accounts from April through September, up from the 1.3 billion accounts it removed in the previous six months. If you were wondering just how widespread false content and accounts are on the platform, wonder no more.
While Facebook is able to pull down more than 90 percent of instances of adult nudity and sexual activity, child nudity / sexual exploitation of children, fake accounts, spam, terrorist propaganda and violence and graphic content, there are two categories where its content moderation falls down. Facebook only found and removed 14.9 percent of bullying and harassment before users reported them; it also only found 51.6 percent of hate speech violations before users reported them (timeframe was July through September of this year).

Read the rest over at Engadget

(Image: own photo)


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I remember years ago when FB was new(ish) and you could keep up with friends without a zillion ads, without political content that I'm not interested in, and when posts were chronological so you could actually find them again. Over the years, FB has gotten worse and worse--the algorithms they've added to make it a better "experience" has instead made it less and less relevant to me. Too bad.
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I had one back around 2009 named "John Smith". Was just exploring to see what all the excitement was about. Didn't like it so tried to cancel it. They wouldn't let me so I just forgot about it. A few years later my daughter's are like "So JOHN. Thought you didn't like Facebook?" "What're you talking about?" "Yeah JOHN SMITH." Busted. So this time, with a lot of effort I did cancel it. Not. Couple of years ago I get an email from them: John! Where you been? We've reset your account and all your friends are waiting... Except I never had any Facebook friends. Don't know who this dude Antonio Morales is but I get regular status updates on him. He likes a lot of pictures. Whatever.
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