Facebook said it disabled 583 million fake accounts created on its social platform in the first three months of 2018.
In a report about its ongoing Community Standards enforcement efforts, the company disclosed that people sometimes create fake accounts on Facebook to misrepresent who they are.
There could be several reasons people will want to disguise their identity, but Facebook appears particular on the use of fake accounts by people it calls “bad actors”. These users create fake accounts in large volumes automatically using scripts or bots, with the intent of spreading spam or conducting illicit activities such as scams.
In the first three months Facebook disabled 583 million fake accounts, down from 694 million in the last quarter of 2017. The company acknowledged that the number of fake accounts created can also be affected by internet factors, including the effectiveness of Facebook’s detection technology.
“Our metrics can vary widely for fake accounts acted on, driven by new cyberattacks and the variability of our detection technology’s ability to find and flag them. The decrease in fake accounts disabled between Q4 and Q1 is largely due to this variation,” Facebook noted in a statement.
Facebook has long published its community standards. But it was not very clear what the company bans with regards to specific rules and the actual numbers.
Alex Schulz, Facebook VP of Analytics, explained in a blog that the report gives a detailed description of the company’s internal processes and data methodology.
Facebook estimates that fake accounts represented approximately 3 percent to 4 percent of monthly active users (MAU) on Facebook during the first quarter and fourth quarter of 2017.
In view of the percentage of accounts that were flagged before users reported them, Facebook said it took action on 98.5 percent in the first quarter compared to 99.1 percent in Q4 of 2017.
