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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Facebook has removed more than 3 billion fake accounts from October to March, twice as many as the previous six months, the company said Thursday.
Almost all were caught before having the chance to become "active" users of the social network.
In a new report, Facebook has announced a "sharp increase" in the creation of false misleading accounts. While most of these fake accounts were blocked "a few minutes" after their creation, the use of computers to generate millions of accounts at once meant not only that Facebook was capturing more fake accounts but that many of them were missing.
As a result, the company estimates that 5% of its 2.4 billion monthly active users are fake accounts, or about 119 million. This figure has increased from around 3% to 4% in the previous half year report.
The increase shows the challenges that Facebook faces in removing accounts created by computers in order to spread spam, false information and other shocking information. Even if Facebook's detection tools improve, the same goes for the creators of these fake accounts.
The new figures come as society faces challenge after challenge, ranging from misinformation to Facebook's role in meddling in elections, hate speech and incitement to violence in the United States, Myanmar, India and elsewhere.
Facebook also said Thursday that it had removed 7.3 million messages, photos and other documents because it had broken its rules against hate speech. This represents an increase of $ 5.4 million over the previous six months.
The company said it discovered more than 65 percent of hate speech before people reported it in the first three months of 2019. This is an improvement from 52 percent in the third quarter of 2018.
Facebook is under increasing pressure to fight hatred on its platform, as documents continue to slide, despite recent bans by extremist figures such as Alex Jones and Louis Farrakhan.
Facebook employs thousands of people to review publications, photos, comments and videos in case of violation. Some things are also detected without humans, using artificial intelligence. Both humans and artificial intelligence make mistakes and Facebook is accused of political bias as well as drastically suppressing publications that discuss – rather than promote – racism.
One of Facebook's thorny problems is the lack of procedures to authenticate the identity of those who open accounts. This is only in cases where a user has been started since the service and has won a call to be reinstated that he asks to see the identity documents.
Some have advocated for stricter authentication of social media services, but the problem is thorny. David Kaye, rapporteur for freedom of expression in the United States, believes that it is important to allow human rights activists and others whose lives may be at risk of harm. 39; to express under a pseudonym online.
Dipayan Ghosh, a former Facebook employee and technology advisor at the White House, is currently a Harvard Fellow, said that in the absence of greater transparency from Facebook, he said he would There was no way of knowing if its improved automated detection better contained the problem of misinformation.
"We lack public transparency on the scale of misinformation on Facebook," he said.
And even if only 5 million accounts have escaped, Ghosh added, how many hate speech and misinformation spread through robots "that overthrow the democratic process by injecting chaos into our political discourse?"
"The only way to solve this problem in the long run is for the government to intervene and impose transparency in these platform operations and confidentiality for the end consumer," he said.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called for government regulation to decide what should be considered harmful content and on other topics. But at least in the United States, the government's regulation of rhetoric could come up against First Amendment hurdles.
And what might the regulation look like – and if companies, legislators, advocates of privacy and freedom of speech and others will agree on what it will should look like – is not clear.
Of the 3.4 billion accounts deleted during the six-month period, $ 1.2 billion were in the fourth quarter of 2018 and $ 2.2 billion in the first quarter of this year. More than 99% of them were disabled before someone reported them to the company. Last year, Facebook blocked 1.5 billion accounts between April and September.
Facebook attributed the rise of deleted accounts to "automated attacks from bad actors who are trying to create large volumes of accounts at the same time". The company refused to say where these attacks came from, but only that they came from different parts of the world.
From this report, Facebook explains how it deals with the sale of "regulated products", namely drugs and firearms. Facebook banned from buying, selling or giving away firearms, as well as drugs, including marijuana, which is legal in some states and countries. The company said it has "taken action" on 1.5 million drug cases and 1.4 million cases of firearms. This usually means removing content from Facebook, but may also involve suspending users or adding warning screens to videos with objectionable content.
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Frank Bajak in Boston contributed to this report.
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