Worried over loss of ads, Facebook takes down over a billion accounts

More than 50% Facebook accounts are fake and they have been duly removed by the social media giant in an unprecedented and proactive action taken following advertisers’ flak.

In just three months (April-June), Facebook (FB) took down around 1.5 billion fake accounts, 1.4 billion spams and 22.5 million hate speeches among others. Fake accounts and spams are the two big areas of concern for the biggest social media platform in the world.

The numbers were released in the sixth edition of Facebook’s Community Standards Enforcement Report, its first quarterly update. The report also gave details of the actions taken on Instagram posts.

Interestingly, the number of active users on Facebook for the second quarter was 2.7 billion. This means that the proportion of fake accounts was 55 per cent of the active users.

Hate speech was the third-largest category under which 22.5 million actions were taken. Earlier, Facebook had faced the ire of big advertisers over its inaction on hate speech-related posts.

Around 4 million accounts were removed for spreading organized hate on FB. This is down from 4.7 million accounts in the previous quarter.

In the terror organisations category, FB knocked out 8.7 million accounts. The number has increased by 2.4 million accounts as compared to the action taken in the first quarter (Jan-Mar) this year.

An alarmingly high number (around 9.5 million) of posts were related to child nudity and sexual exploitation. The number has come down though. It was 13.3 million in the last quarter of 2019.

Proactive not reactive

In most of these cases, Facebook took proactive action, which means the reviewers or Artificial Intelligence technology at Facebook had identified these contents even before the users reported them. The rate of proactive actions is above 95 per cent in almost all categories.

Very few proactive actions were taken in bullying and harassment related cases as these posts are mostly subjective and can’t be identified in general by a third party.

The percentage of proactive action on hate speech posts has spiked significantly after giant advertisers like Ford, Verizon, Coca-Cola joined the #StopHateForProfit movement in July which appealed to ban Facebook ads. Microsoft, Pepsi and Starbucks had also taken their ads off Facebook during this time.

Related news: To curb hate speech, Facebook removes 2 crore posts in three months