Facebook takes down over 1.5B fake accounts in six months

For six months alone, Facebook had taken down over 1.5 billion fake accounts.

The social media giant disclosed this in its second and latest Community Standards Enforcement Report posted on its website on Thursday.

Facebook said the second report shows the company’s enforcement efforts on policies against adult nudity and sexual activity, fake accounts, hate speech, spam, terrorist propaganda, and violence and graphic content, from April 2018 to September 2018.

“Since our last report, the amount of hate speech we detect proactively before anyone reports it, has more than doubled from 24% to 52%,” it said.

Based on the report, the 24 percent detection rate was recorded from October to December last year while the 52 percent rate was recorded from July to September this year.

“The majority of posts that we take down for hate speech are posts that we’ve found before anyone reported them to us,” Facebook said.


“This is incredibly important work and we continue to invest heavily where our work is in the early stages — and to improve our performance in less widely used languages.”

Meanwhile, Facebook’s proactive detection rate for violence and graphic content increased by 25 percentage— from 72% in the last quarter of 2017 to 97% in the third quarter of this year.

“We also took down more fake accounts in Q2 and Q3 than in previous quarters, 800 million and 754 million respectively,” the company noted.

“Most of these fake accounts were the result of commercially motivated spam attacks trying to create fake accounts in bulk,” it added.


Facebook said the prevalence of fake accounts remained steady at 3% to 4% of monthly active users because they were able to remove most of them within minutes of registration.

In the third quarter of 2018, Facebook said they also took action on 15.4 million pieces of violent and graphic content.

“This included removing content, putting a warning screen over it, disabling the offending account and/or escalating content to law enforcement,” it said.

“This is more than 10 times the amount we took action on in Q4 2017. This increase was due to continued improvements in our technology that allows us to automatically apply the same action on extremely similar or identical content,” it further said.

The report also includes two new categories of data — bullying and harassment and child nudity and sexual exploitation of children.

The company though explained that bullying and harassment “tend to be personal and context-specific” so they need a person to report this behavior before Facebook can identify or remove it.

“This results in a lower proactive detection rate than other types of violations,” it said.

“In the last quarter, we took action on 2.1 million pieces of content that violated our policies for bullying and harassment — removing 15% of it before it was reported. We proactively discovered this content while searching for other types of violations,” Facebook said.


source: technology.inquirer.net

Facebook looking at behavior to weed out fake accounts

Facebook on Wednesday said it has started weeding out bogus accounts by watching for suspicious behavior such as repetitive posts or torrents of messages.

The security improvement was described as being part of a broader effort to rid the leading social network of hoaxes, misinformation, and fake news by making sure people are who they claim to be.

“We’ve found that when people represent themselves on Facebook the same way they do in real life, they act responsibly,” Shabnam Shaik of the Facebook protect and care team said in a blog post.

“Fake accounts don’t follow this pattern, and are closely related to the creation and spread of spam.”

Accounts suspected of being bogus are suspended and holders asked to verify identifies, which scammers typically don’t do, according to the California-based social network.

In France, the new tactic has already resulted in Facebook taking action against 30,000 accounts believed to be fakes, Shaik said.

“We’ve made improvements to recognize these inauthentic accounts more easily by identifying patterns of activity — without assessing the content itself,” Shaik said.

“With these changes, we expect we will also reduce the spread of material generated through inauthentic activity, including spam, misinformation, or other deceptive content that is often shared by creators of fake accounts.”

Under pressure to stymie the spread of fake news, Facebook has taken a series of steps including making it easier to report such posts and harder to make money from them.

Facebook also modified its displays of trending topics to find stories faster, capture a broader range of news, and help ensure that trends reflect real world events being covered by multiple news outlets.

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has sought to deflect criticism that the huge social network may have been used to fuel the spread of misinformation that affected the 2016 US presidential race.

Facebook last week unleashed a new weapon in the war against “revenge porn” at the social network as well as the messaging services Messenger and Instagram.

When intimate images shared on Facebook without permission are reported, confirmed and removed, the company will use photo-matching technology to prevent copies from being shared again on its platform.

source: technology.inquirer.net