Facebook Closed 583 Million Fake Accounts in First Three Months of 2018

Alex Hern and Olivia Solon, reporting for The Guardian:

In its first quarterly Community Standards Enforcement Report, Facebook said the overwhelming majority of moderation action was against spam posts and fake accounts: it took action on 837m pieces of spam, and shut down a further 583m fake accounts on the site in the three months. But Facebook also moderated 2.5m pieces of hate speech, 1.9m pieces of terrorist propaganda, 3.4m pieces of graphic violence and 21m pieces of content featuring adult nudity and sexual activity.

583 million fake accounts is a rather staggering figure. For context, Twitter’s entire active user base — which surely includes untold millions of fake accounts — is just 330 million. The population of the United States is around 325 million.

★ Tuesday, 15 May 2018