Facebook removes 3.2 billion fake accounts, 11.4 million hate posts

Facebook in the April- September period has removed around 3.2 billion fake accounts along with taking action on 11.4 million hate speech posts in the same period.

Facebook says that it has removed 5.4 billion fake accounts and 15.5 million hate speech posts.

"Over the past two quarters, we have improved our ability to detect and block attempts to create fake, abusive accounts. We can estimate that every day, we prevent millions of attempts from creating fake accounts using these detection systems," the social networking giant said on Wednesday.

According to the company majority of these accounts were caught within minutes of registration before they became a part of Facebook monthly active user (MAU) population.

"Our proactive rate remained above 99 per cent for both quarters. Prevalence for fake accounts continues to estimated at approximately 5 per cent of our worldwide monthly active users (MAU) on Facebook," said the company.

In its Community Standards Enforcement Report for November 2019 Edition revealed that it is for the first time sharing data on how it is enforcing its policies on Instagram.

Facebook has removed about 835000 pieces of content related to self-harm and suicide in Q2 2019 and removed about 845000 pieces of content in Q3 2019.

Facebook has also removed around 11.6 million pieces of content related to child nudity and sexual exploitation of children. The company over the last four quarters proactively detected over 99 per cent content to be violating the company's policy.

Earlier this year, the company began allowing its hate speech algorithms to begin automatically removing content that violates its policies.

In the result of the decision sharp spike in the amount of hate speech was taken off from Facebook. Facebook is using machine learning-based detection technology that can find and flag hate speech using several different methods.\

In Q2 2019 the system began removing posts automatically when they received very high scores or matched existing hate speech in facebook's database.

In all other cases, when the system detects potential hate speech, it sends the post to review team to determine if it should be removed or not.