Facebook says it took down 2.19 billion accounts in Q1 2019

Social network giant Facebook revealed it recently disabled billions of accounts operated by “bad actors” and that five percent of active accounts are fake.

The news is disconcerting, but sincerely not so surprising, Facebook announced it recently disabled billions of accounts operated by “bad actors” and that five percent of its active accounts are fake.

Facebook released its third Community Standards Enforcement Report, covering Q4 2018 and Q1 2019 that provides an estimate of its efforts in fighting the abuse of the social network platform and actions to identify and taken accounts managed by threat actors.

Data is impressive, the company disabled 2.19 billion accounts in the first quarter of 2019, the number if doubled respect the number of accounts blocked in the prior quarter.

“The amount of accounts we took action on increased due to automated attacks by bad actors who attempt to create large volumes of accounts at one time,” Facebook said,

“We disabled 1.2 billion accounts in the fourth quarter of 2018 and 2.19 billion in the first quarter of 2019. We’ll continue to find more ways to counter attempts to violate our policies,”

Facebook apparently disabled the accounts because they have been created by imposters through automated processes.

Facebook also highlighted its the progress made in battling hate speech, its systems were able to automatically detect 65 percent of the content removed before needing someone to report it. This represents great success respect the previous year, with an increase of 24% in automatic detection.

In Q1 2019, Facebook took down four million posts with a content classified as hate speech.

“In the first quarter of 2019, we took down 4 million hate speech posts and we continue to invest in technology to expand our abilities to detect this content across different languages and regions.” continues Facebook.

Additional data are included in the report, enjoy it!

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – Fake accounts, social network)

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