Facebook closed 583m fake accounts in first three months of 2018

[malaise]

Holy Shit that's 583m fake accounts

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/15/facebook-closed-583m-fake-accounts-in-first-three-months-of-2018
<snip>
Facebook took moderation action against almost 1.5bn accounts and posts which violated its community standards in the first three months of 2018, the company has revealed.

In its first quarterly Community Standards Enforcement Report, Facebook said the overwhelming majority of moderation action was against spam posts and fake accounts: it took action on 837m pieces of spam, and shut down a further 583m fake accounts on the site in the three months. But Facebook also moderated 2.5m pieces of hate speech, 1.9m pieces of terrorist propaganda, 3.4m pieces of graphic violence and 21m pieces of content featuring adult nudity and sexual activity.

“This is the start of the journey and not the end of the journey and we’re trying to be as open as we can,” said Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice-president of public policy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

[C_U_L8R]

1. Half a billion fake accounts ???

What a cesspool.

[malaise]

3. That hit me big time

It's uncontrolled madness.

[Stallion]

2. Republicans have Protested Noting Some of their Best Friends Were Bots

[malaise]

4. Clearly

[Orsino]

5. I didn't know there were that many Facebook accounts total. n/t

[malaise]

7. It's freaking unbelievable

That's more people than live in either North America (579,024,000m) or South America(422,535,000).
So they were selling ads based on all these fake bots?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_continents_by_population

[Orsino]

12. I wonder how much Facebook makes from marketing to bots? n/t

[dalton99a]

6. The factory in St. Petersburg is working overtime

[malaise]

8. LOL

And then some

[Wounded Bear]

10. They have subsidiaries in Macedonia...

and probably several other Balkan states.

[maxrandb]

9. I wonder how much of facebooks ad revenue is based on

the total number of users??

Hmmmmmmm!

[malaise]

11. Precisely

which makes me wonder whether they had anything to do with these fake accounts?
That would be high level fraud.