In its first transparency report of 2019 social media giant Facebook has declared that it had removed 5.4 billion accounts that were fake since January to September. The report was published on Wednesday.
According to Facebook employees, millions of such accounts still remain. For the sake of comparison take the example of previous year when Facebook removed 3.3 billion accounts in the whole year. It goes to show that people are now using Facebook for spreading fake news, violence and causing disruption in government of a country.
The report further declared that more than 5% of its users who are active every month are fake accounts. This is despite the fact that Facebook has recently undergone changes and that its software according to Facebook employees can detect a fake user profile the moment they are created and delete such profiles from its databases entirely.
This is a very important release statement for the social media giant as it prepares itself for the US Presidential elections next year. Also on the plate is the 2020 US census. Analysts and data security firms are expecting things to get tougher just as they did back in 2016 when millions of fake accounts from Russia and some middle-east Islamic countries were accused of spreading fake news and trying to cause major civilian unrest and civic violence. Facebook was later successful in deleting majority of these accounts.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg is taking the issue very seriously and said that the latest changes in the system show that the social media company was looking to completely stop this issue. He also urged other similar websites to make such disclosures and take important steps towards detecting and deleting the fake accounts.
The company has also worked for removing pieces of violent content and posts from its system. The company also said that it removed 95000 pieces of Instagram content in connection with gun sale