Facebook removes more than 500 million fake accounts

The social network released data in a new Facebook Community Standards Enforcement report.

By Lenyon Whitaker, Metro

More than 500 million fake Facebook accounts have been removed, according to a new Facebook Community Standards Enforcement report released on Tuesday.

Facebook has approximately 2.2 billion monthly active users and according to the report, 583 million fake Facebook accounts were disabled in the first three months of 2018.

Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of product management said that of the 583 million fake Facebook accounts removed between January 1 and March 31 of this year.

Facebook released the report in an effort to be more transparent and allow its users to see what’s being done to reduce the amount of  Facebook content accounts that violate its Community Standards.

The Facebook Community Standards Enforcement Report also covers how increased efforts have been made to remove content that contains graphic violence, adult nudity, sexual activity, terrorist propaganda, hate speech and spam messages.

AI used to remove fake Facebook accounts removed

According to Facebook, it has been relying on artificial intelligence to detect fake profiles and other content that violates its policies. The social network says it has built artificial intelligence technology to increase its ability to find and flag questionable content before most users can. Facebook says it is continuing to improve its algorithms, metrics and methodologies to detect content that violates its Community Standards.

In addition to the 583 million fake Facebook accounts that were disabled, 837 million pieces of spam content were also removed in the first quarter of 2018. The social network claims it was able to use artificial intelligence to find and flag the content before it was reported.

Although artificial intelligence has helped with detecting fake Facebook accounts and spam, there still needs to be some improvements made in artificial intelligence technology to detect hate speech.

“Technology isn’t going to solve all of it, but we will make progress,” Rosen told the Financial Times.

That’s where effort from its users becomes more important than ever.  While algorithms or different forms of artificial intelligence can be used to detect and remove fake and offensive content before it spreads to the Facebook community, the social network still relies on its users to submit questionable content to be checked by Facebook’s review teams.