Facebook announced this week that it removed an additional three billion accounts from the platform over the past six months for violating its community guidelines, more than doubling the number it has deleted in the past year.
In a series of blog posts, Facebook presented a range of data points and points of view addressing how the social media giant's crackdown on fake content has been going so far.
Facebook said that between October 2018 and March 2019, it removed approximately 3 billion fake accounts from the platform; these include malicious or suspicious accounts but also "user-misclassified" accounts, as when a Facebook Page should have been created rather than a personal Facebook profile.
In the prior six months, Facebook had removed closer to 1.5 billion accounts, according to the company.
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Among other things, the company noted that it removed a record 7 million hate-speech posts from the site during the same window.
Facebook also provided first-of-its-kind data on users' appeals to these actions, the use of accounts to sell illegal materials like drugs and guns, and the prevalence of other unapproved content on the platform:
- We estimated for every 10,000 times people viewed content on Facebook, 11 to 14 views contained content that violated our adult nudity and sexual activity policy.
- We estimated for every 10,000 times people viewed content on Facebook, 25 views contained content that violated our violence and graphic content policy.
- For fake accounts, we estimated that 5% of monthly active accounts are fake.
As CNET's Queenie Wong and Shelby Brown pointed out, "Facebook's report comes as it's trying to set up a board that'll decide what content gets removed or stays up on the social network after a user appeals ... Meanwhile, Facebook could face a record fine of up to $5 billion from the Federal Trade Commission, [and] lawmakers and even some of the company's own co-founders are asking US regulators to break up Facebook."
