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Despite recent measures taken to enforce the law, Facebook is still struggling with fake accounts, including thousands of people helping to promote a far-right German political party.
Facebook announced this week the removal of 2.19 billion fake accounts between January and March, its largest reduction of fake ever recorded in a single quarter. The company's chairman, Mark Zuckerberg, told the media: "We are eliminating more fake accounts than ever before".
What he did not say is that there are also more active fake Facebook accounts six months ago – more than ever before. Facebook now says that 5% of active accounts are fake, up from the previous estimate of 3% to 4%.
The scan of more than 2 billion fake accounts, although impressive, largely deleted profiles at the time of creation. As Zuckerberg has said, "they have never been considered active in our systems and we do not count them in any of the overall measures of our community."
So, based on the key metric used by Facebook to measure false accounts, the problem gets worse. People investigating fake accounts on the platform have also told BuzzFeed News that the company still fails to eliminate obvious counterfeits even during critical periods, such as elections to the European Parliament.
Two days before Facebook publishes its latest report on community standards with the number of deleted accounts, the German broadcaster ZDF published a report on a network of thousands of suspicious Facebook accounts liking the pages and content of AfD, the party of the day. German extreme right. This follows a recent article in Der Spiegel, a German weekly newspaper, according to which AfD content accounts for 85% of all political content affiliated with a German party and shared on Facebook.
In both cases, the data came from Trevor Davis, a research professor at George Washington University. He spent three months researching the AfD's presence on Facebook and investigating hundreds of thousands of Facebook accounts who liked the AfD's pages or publications.
"What I can prove is that in the space of three months, I have identified 200,000 accounts with two or more artificial aspects," he said. BuzzFeed News.
His findings, and the fact that Facebook still has not acted after ZDF's story, show that the company is failing to remove the fake active accounts.
"Of the nearly 200,000 likely fraudulent accounts we have identified, Facebook has suspended 500 in total during our study period," he said in a message. "They failed to suspend their accounts using stolen footage of famous actors and even the late President of Kosovo as a profile picture. They failed to suspend accounts in Muslim countries that "love" hundreds of Islamophobic publications a day. This happened during an election. I find it's a strange moment for Facebook to publicly congratulate itself. "
A Facebook spokesman told BuzzFeed News that he needed more details from Davis to investigate his findings.
"Mr. Davis did not share his research with us so that we could justify his claims, and we would be happy to conduct an investigation, as we often do when we receive advice from researchers," they said. an email.
Davis is not in agreement.
"Although this research was communicated to them via two different German publishers last month (Spiegel, ZDF), Facebook chose not to contact me directly," he said.
Davis provided BuzzFeed News with a draft white paper and associated presentation summarizing its data and results. He said that they show that AfD enjoys a massive network of non-genuine accounts and activities.
Most of the accounts he found contained pictures of stolen profiles, and only looked like pages or AfD content. Thousands of profiles have two family names. Similarly, thousands of accounts who liked AfD's pages or publications indicated on their profiles that they lived in predominantly Muslim countries and that they bore Muslim names. The AfD frequently broadcasts anti-Muslim content and has issued a policy document stating that "Islam is not part of Germany".
Davis said the evidence of inauthenticity among the profiles he's reviewed is overwhelming, but Facebook has failed to act.
"I think it's important that Facebook not only be aware of what happened, but also the public. The question we should all be asking ourselves is this: What failure to find by these accounts themselves demonstrates their ability to control manipulation on their network? "
When the ZDF sent Facebook a sample of 20 accounts for investigation purposes, the company immediately removed two of them and challenged the owners of six others to provide Facebook verification of their identities. He said the remaining 12 were real. But among these 12 supposed real accounts was a false account created by ZDF itself a few weeks earlier.
"Our account, the only one we knew, was a hundred percent fake, Facebook was considered genuine," wrote Stephan Mündges and Ulrich Stoll of ZDF.
AfD has not responded to a request for comment sent by email. But Jörg Meuthen, a spokesman for the party, told ZDF that AFD had not paid for the accounts or for the promotion of other social media. He also stated that there was nothing suspicious about the possibility for people based outside of Germany to interact with AfD content even at a high frequency.
"The fact that individual district associations have sympathizers who sometimes live several hundred kilometers from these district associations is quite normal in our party. The members and supporters of our party are very close to each other on the Internet. "
Davis is not the only person to look for fake products on Facebook who said his business was collapsing. Sarah Thompson has been documenting spammers and fake accounts overseas since at least 2016. She said she had stopped reporting fake accounts to the company because of her inaction.
"I think Facebook might be able to bring back a fantastic number of their [artificial intelligence] fight against automatically generated accounts entering the system and remove them before they go into production, but the bad actors use back-and-forth accounts, "she said, referring to accounts created by real people but resumed later by bad actors.
Kathy Kostrub-Waters has spent years trying to get Facebook to remove fake accounts run by fraudsters. She added that the company was unable to prevent fraudsters from stealing military photos and creating profiles with them.
"We asked the team we worked with [at Facebook] repeatedly for the numbers [of] the accounts they say have erased, "she said. Kostrub-Waters said that she still had not received any concrete information from the company.
As for the announcement by Facebook of the removal of nearly 2.2 billion accounts, she considers it a calculated gesture.
"It's all about putting people's minds at ease so they can get past another hurdle of not being regulated by the federal government," she said in an email.
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