Facebook removes 3.2 billion fake accounts, 11.6 million child abuse posts

Facebook removed 3.2 billion fake accounts between April and September this year, along with millions of posts depicting child abuse and suicide, according to its l atest content moderation report released on Wednesday. That more than doubles the number of fake accounts taken down during the same period last year, when 1.55 billion accounts were removed, according to the report. Facebook also disclosed for the first time how many posts it removed from Instagram, which has been identified as a growing area of concern about fake news by disinformation researchers. Proactive detection of violating content was lower across all categories on Instagram than on Facebook’s flagship app, where the company initially implemented many of its detection tools, the company said in its fourth content moderation report. [caption id=“attachment_7353151” align=“alignnone” width=“1024”]  Image: Pixabay[/caption] For example, the company said it proactively detected content affiliated with terrorist organizations 98.5 percent of the time on Facebook and 92.2 percent of the time on Instagram. It removed more than 11.6 million pieces of content depicting child nudity and sexual exploitation of children on Facebook and 754,000 pieces on Instagram during the third quarter. Facebook also added data on actions it took around content involving self-harm for the first time in the report. It said it had removed about 2.5 million posts in the third quarter that depicted or encouraged suicide or self-injury. The company also removed about 4.4 million pieces involving drug sales during the quarter, it said in a blog post. Facebook has also launched a new page so people can view how its Community Standards apply to different types of content. Besides, in its transparency report, Facebook also lists that in the first half of 2019, government requests for user data increased by 16 percent from 110,634 to 128,617. And of the total volume, the US continues to submit the largest number of requests, followed by India, the UK, Germany, and France. In the report, Facebook also reveals the number of deliberate internet disruptions caused by governments around the world that impacted the availability of Facebook. Reportedly, during this reporting period, 67 disruptions of Facebook services took place in fifteen countries, compared to 53 disruptions in nine countries in the second half of 2018. With inputs from Reuters.