In a call with journalists on Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that in 2019 alone, the social media company had nixed 5.4 billion fake accounts, according to CNN — two-thirds of the world’s population, and four times China’s population.
It’s a tremendous amount of fake accounts. And the trend is ticking up: only 3.3 billion fake accounts were deleted by the company throughout 2018.
“Our goal is to remove as many fake accounts on Facebook as we can,” the company said. “We prioritize enforcement against users and accounts that seek to cause harm and find many of these fake accounts are used in spam campaigns and are financially motivated.”
Facebook also reported that over the past two quarters they have enhanced their ability to discover and prevent attempts to create fake and abusive accounts.
“We can estimate that every day, we prevent millions of attempts to create fake accounts using these detection systems,” the company said. “Because we are blocking more attempts to create fake, abusive accounts before they are even created, there are fewer for us to disable and, thus, accounts actioned has declined since Q1 2019.”
Experts, analysts, and online watchdogs are preparing for a tsunami of false and misleading content to flood social media as the presidential election of 2020 approaches and Facebook is no different.
The company burned the midnight oil to get fake accounts out of the platform as it was bombarded during the 2016 campaign with disinformation from fake accounts.
In my opinion, there should be some type of verification before account creation. Social media are a great place for the scam as number of potential victims is only growing and companies nowadays try to connect with customers through social media, as people won’t understand that the profile is fake.
References:
https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-shut-down-5-billion-fake-accounts
https://people.com/human-interest/facebook-shut-down-over-5-billion-fake-accounts/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7683069/Facebook-shut-5-4-BILLION-fake-accounts-far-year-2-billion-2018.html
Damn! That’s triple the size of actual active members nowadays!
Hopefully, all social media platforms will do the same in the near future. It benefits everyone!