On the 15th of May, the first ever Community Standards Enforcement Report was published by Facebook. Guy Rosen, Vice President of Product Management revealed that Facebook deleted 583 million fake accounts in the first three months of 2018.
Rosen explained that an average of 6.5 million fake accounts were created every day from the start of 2018 to March 31st. He also went on to say that majority of these accounts were disabled with the help of the Facebook AI tools right after their registration. It is still estimated that there are 3 to 4 % fake accounts present, which makes 66 million accounts out of 1.7 billion users fake.
Additionally, Facebook managed to flag and delete 837 million spam posts in the first quarter of 2018 and most of which were deleted before the users got a chance to report them. Rosen said, “The key to fighting spam is taking down the fake accounts that spread it.”
Ever since Cambridge Analytica scandal came to light, Facebook has been doubling up on efforts to restore the faith of the public on the social network. More than 200 third-party apps have been banned by Facebook recently that were found violating data policies and community standards of Facebook.
Even though the team behind the social network is working day and night to better the AI tools, they still have a long way to go and everyone knows that. The people are starting to forget the scandal and looking at it in the rearview mirror but it will be a long time before they forget it completely.
Mark Zuckerberg said at F8 Conference, “we have a lot of work still to do to prevent abuse.” Rosen noted that “It’s partly that technology like artificial intelligence, while promising, is still years away from being effective for most bad content because context is so important.”