Facebook Closes One Billion Fake Accounts

Facebook, the largest social networking site with 2.2 billion users has recently revealed that it has disabled 1.3 billion fake Facebook accounts in past six months between last October to March this year. Mostly the account of the bad players, which represented nearly 4 percent of the active Facebook profiles.

Apart from the closing down the fake accounts, the social networking site has also removed more than one million spam posts including commercials, false ads, hate posts and promotional materials. Facebook said, “Getting better at eliminating fake accounts makes us more effective at preventing other kinds of violations.”

According to Facebook, the number fake Facebook accounts have increased since November last year. Till then 2 to 3 percent accounts were fake and nearly 10 percent were duplicate accounts, which means one person having multiple Facebook profiles. The fake accounts sometimes are created by individuals to project themselves differently. But some groups also created fake accounts in large numbers with the intention of spreading spams and other illegal activities.

Facebook has revealed all this in a data report also called Community Standards Enforcement Report, following the recently introduced transparency drive after it came under attack following a series of scandals in the recent months, which includes Cambridge Analytica Scandal. In the scandal, the data of 90 million Facebook users were taken away by the British data consultancy company without the knowledge of Facebook.

Facebook also informed that its artificial intelligence tools have identified 99 percent of fake accounts and has disabled 583 million fake accounts at the start of the year. It also said that its tools have identified 99.5 percent of 1.9 million terrorist propaganda posts and has removed them immediately.

Apart from this, it has removed the spams which include hate speech, material related to sex and nudity mostly the images and videos. In total, 21 million such contents are removed from the social networking site immediately after discovering them.

According to Guy Rosen, Vice President, Product Management at Facebook, in a statement said, “It's important to stress that this is very much a work in progress and we will likely change our methodology as we learn more about what's important and what works.  We have a lot of work still to do to prevent abuse”.

In the past few months Facebook had to face severe criticism from governments and rights groups for failing to protect the data of its users and not able to do enough to stop hate speech and prevent the services of the network from being used to promote terrorism, which often incited sectarian conflict and feed broadcast of acts which includes murder and suicide.

Now Facebook uses softwares including artificial intelligence tools and an army of moderators to detect and delete text, pictures, and videos that violate its rules.

Facebook still believes that it requires more time to make Facebook a safer platform as Rosen said technology like artificial intelligence still needs years for effectively detecting bad contents. “Technology needs large amounts of training data to recognize meaningful patterns of behavior, which we often lack in less widely used languages”.