Facebook has published its third Community Standards Enforcement Report which provides metrics on the social network's efforts at preventing and removing controversial content. In the six-month period from October 2018 to March 2019, Facebook said it removed 3.39 billion fake accounts. That's twice the number of fake accounts detected and removed in the previous six-month period and over a billion more than the 2.37 billion people who actively use the social network on a monthly basis.
Facebook attributed the rise in the number of fake accounts to an increasing number of attacks by bad actors who attempt to create large volumes of accounts at once. Detection was carried out through a combination of artificial intelligence and human monitoring with most of the fake accounts blocked within minutes of their creation. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told journalists that the report shows how the company is making progress in areas like hate speech and graphic violence, stating that "we're increasingly catching it before people report it to us". Despite that, he acknowledged that there's still a lot of work ahead regarding content issues.
*Click below to enlarge (charted by Statista)
