Facebook Removed Nearly 3.4 Billion Fake Accounts In Last Six Months
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, pictured earlier this month in France, told reporters on Thursday, the tech giant is making great strides in fighting hate speech and crime online.
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Francois Mori/AP
Facebook says it removed 3.39 billion fake accounts from October to March. That’s twice the number of fraudulent accounts deleted in the previous six-month period.
In the company’s latest Community Standards Enforcement Report, released Thursday, Facebook said nearly all of the fake accounts were caught by artificial intelligence and more human monitoring. They also attributed the skyrocketing number to “automated attacks by bad actors who attempt to create large volumes of accounts at one time.”
The fake accounts are roughly a billion more than the 2.4 billion actual people on Facebook worldwide, according to the company’s own count.
“Most of these accounts were blocked within minutes of their creation before they could do any harm,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters in a call on Thursday.
While acknowledging that Facebook “knows that there’s a lot of work ahead,” Zuckerberg also touted the company’s progress in curbing hate speech and graphic violence across the platform.
“We are increasingly catching it before people report it to us,” he said, adding that 65% of the hate speech on the site was removed before any users alerted the company. That is an increase from about 24% a year ago, Zuckerberg said.
During the same period, Facebook identified about 83% of posts and comments trying to sell drugs, before the company was informed about them, he added.
Facebook is facing a number of controversies on its platform including election interference, misinformation and privacy concerns. And a growing number of critics, including politicians and one of its co-founders, are calling for the company to be broken up. They argue Facebook, which has acquired Instagram and WhatsApp in recent years, wields far too much power and has a monopoly in the industry.
Chris Hughes, who co-founded the company in 2004, told NPR earlier this month, Zuckerberg “is unaccountable.”
“He’s unaccountable to his shareholders. He’s unaccountable to his users, and he’s unaccountable to government. And I think that that’s fundamentally un-American. And I think government should step up, break up the company and regulate it,” he said.
He added that the company “totally dominates the social networking space.”
“Of every dollar that’s spent on ads and social networking, 84% goes to Facebook,” Hughes said. “If you look at the time spent on the site, you know, the average user [is] spending an hour on Facebook and another 53 minutes on Instagram, not to mention what they’re spending on WhatsApp.”
Dipayan Ghosh, co-director of the Platform Accountability Project at the Harvard University’s Kennedy School, previously served as Facebook’s privacy and policy advisor. “Without some sort of public transparency into steps the company takes to take down nefarious accounts, we should not conclude it’s doing enough,” he told NPR.
But on Thursday, Zuckerberg argued the new report is evidence of the company’s efforts to be more transparent. He also asserted that breaking up Facebook would only make it harder to quash fake news and phony accounts across the site.
Abortion Limits Carry Economic Cost For Women
Demonstrators listen to speeches during a rally in support of abortion rights on Thursday in Miami.
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Lynne Sladky/AP
As Republican-led states pass laws restricting abortion in hopes the Supreme Court will overturn its Roe v. Wade decision, supporters of abortion rights are pushing back.
Thousands of women who’ve had abortions have taken to social media to share their experience. Many argue they would have been worse off economically, had they been forced to deliver a baby.
“I didn’t know what I would do with a baby,” said Jeanne Myers, who was unmarried and unemployed when she got pregnant 36 years ago.
“I was horrified,” she said. “I had no job. I would have been in no financial position to care for a kid.”
By the time she knew she was pregnant, Myers was already in her second trimester — too late for an abortion in Janesville, Wisc., where she lived. So she saved up her money for a trip to a specialty clinic in Madison, where a doctor terminated the pregnancy.
“I cried through the whole procedure,” Myers recalled. “I had guilt probably for a year. But you know what? I don’t regret it. Because if I hadn’t had that procedure when I was young, I would not be where I am today.”
Myers is among the thousands of women who’ve been sharing their stories under the hashtag YouKnowMe in recent days, in an effort to reduce the stigma surrounding abortion and preserve the right for other women. They cite a wide variety of reasons for getting an abortion but a common theme is the economic hardship that having a baby would have posed for both mother and child.
Amanda Payne of Durham, N.C., was just 15 when she got pregnant and totally unprepared to raise a kid.
“I probably would have had to drop out of high school,” she said. “My boyfriend, who ended up being my husband, he had low-paying jobs. We didn’t have anything. I don’t think my life would be what it is today if I had continued that pregnancy.”
A study published in the American Journal of Public Health backs that up. Researchers reached out to more than 800 women who sought abortions around the country, including some who were denied because their pregnancies were too far along. The most common reason the women gave for wanting an abortion was they couldn’t afford to support a child. Researchers then kept tabs on the women and their families for the next five years.
“When we actually look at the outcomes for women, we see that they were right to be concerned,” said Diana Greene Foster, the study’s lead author. “Because women who are denied an abortion and carry the pregnancy to term are more likely to be poor for years after, compared to women who receive the abortion.”
Three out of four women who seek an abortion in the U.S. are already low-income. Foster, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, argues that restricting their access just makes poor women poorer. After all, it’s hard to work full-time with a baby or toddler. And government safety-net programs don’t make up for that lost income or the additional cost of an extra person in the family. About 10% of the women denied abortion in the study put their babies up for adoption.
Of course, to people with a strong moral objection to abortion, economic arguments are beside the point. Opponents often liken abortion to slavery. And just as abolitionists didn’t worry about imposing unwanted costs on plantation owners, anti-abortion forces are not deterred by the high price of child rearing. But polls show most Americans don’t hold such absolutist views about abortion. And with conservative state lawmakers challenging Roe v. Wade, economic research may provide important context.
“If the government is going to step into reproductive decision-making, it’s going to have to consider the economic implications of doing that,” Foster said.
She noted that many women seeking abortion already have other children. And many others want to have kids, once they’re in better circumstances.
That was true of Jeanne Myers, who had a baby daughter three years after her abortion. By that time she was married and both she and her husband were working.
“I wanted to give my kids the best I could. And I did,” Myers said. “I didn’t want to raise a child knowing I couldn’t afford to do it.”
Myers now has two grown daughters. And she worries that when it comes to timing child rearing, they may not have the same options she did.
