{"id":19354,"date":"2019-05-23T14:58:40","date_gmt":"2019-05-23T22:58:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/associatednews.info\/content\/facebook-removed-nearly-3-4-billion-fake-accounts-in-last-six-months\/"},"modified":"2019-05-23T14:58:40","modified_gmt":"2019-05-23T22:58:40","slug":"facebook-removed-nearly-3-4-billion-fake-accounts-in-last-six-months","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/associatednews.info\/content\/facebook-removed-nearly-3-4-billion-fake-accounts-in-last-six-months\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook Removed Nearly 3.4 Billion Fake Accounts In Last Six Months"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Vanessa Romo<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

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\n 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.<\/p>\n

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Francois Mori\/AP<\/p>\n

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Francois Mori\/AP<\/p>\n

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Facebook says it removed 3.39 billion fake accounts<\/a> from October to March. That’s twice the number of fraudulent accounts deleted in the previous six-month period. <\/p>\n

In the company’s latest Community Standards Enforcement Report<\/a>, 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.”<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. <\/p>\n

“Most of these accounts were blocked within minutes of their creation before they could do any harm,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told <\/a>reporters in a call on Thursday. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

“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. <\/p>\n