Facebook removed more than 3 billion fake accounts from October to March, twice as many as the previous six months, the company said Thursday
Nearly all of them were caught before they had a chance to become"active" users of the social network.
The increase shows the challenges Facebook faces in removing accounts created by computers to spread spam, fake news and other objectionable material. Even as Facebook's detection tools get better, so do the efforts by the creators of these fake accounts. The company said it found more than 65 percent of hate speech on its own, before people reported it, during the first three months of 2019. That's an improvement from 52 percent in the third quarter of 2018.
A thorny issue for Facebook is its lack of procedures for authenticating the identities of those setting up accounts. Only in instances where a user has been booted off the service and won an appeal to be reinstated does it ask to see ID documents. "We lack public transparency into the scale of disinformation operations on Facebook in the first place," he said.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called for government regulation to decide what should be considered harmful content and on other issues. But at least in the U.S., government regulation of speech could run into First Amendment hurdles.
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