Facebook disabled 2.19 billion false accounts in the first quarter of 2019

Facebook has released its third Community Standards Compliance Report, which covers the fourth quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019. The report revealed that the social media giant eliminated 2.19 billion false accounts in the first quarter of 2019.

Whereas, 1.2 billion false accounts were disabled in the last quarter of 2018. The current monthly active users of the Facebook amount to 2.38 billion. However, the company believes that 5 percent of its monthly active accounts are false.

“The number of accounts for which we took action increased due to the automatic attacks of bad actors who try to create large volumes of accounts at the same time,” Facebook said in a blog post.

The company uses three different ways of dealing with fake accounts. It blocks the creation of accounts, eliminates them when they are registered and eliminates existing accounts after checking them.

The report also contains data on appeals and restored content along with data on regulated products, that is, attempts at illicit sales of regulated products such as the sale of drugs and firearms.

Facebook considers this content malicious in its policy areas. These areas include spam, adult nudity and sexual activity, hate speech, bullying and harassment, violence and graphic content, regulated goods (drugs and firearms), terrorist propaganda, nudity child and the sexual exploitation of children.

The company also notes in the report that it has made progress in proactively identifying hate speech. It successfully detected 65 percent of hate speech content in the first quarter of 2019, which was 59 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018.