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583 Million Fake Facebook Accounts Have Been Shut Down – Mark Zuckerberg

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583 Million Fake Facebook Accounts have Been Shut Down-Mark Zuckerberg

A major Social media site in the world, Facebook,  says it has shut down 583 million fake accounts in the first quarter of 2018 as it revealed the huge scale of abuse on the platform.

Naija News learnt that the site also revealed how much malicious content was being published and shared on the site for the first time ever.

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This is coming as Facebook has been criticized for the way the platform has been abused, with accusations it has helped changed the course of elections and enabled criminal behaviour.

It said it had taken down 837 million pieces of spam content between January and March of this year.

The social network said nearly 100 per cent of this content was found and removed before it was reported, and was accompanied by the removal of around 583 million fake accounts, most of which were disabled within minutes of being activated.

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However, the social network admitted its automated tools were still struggling to pick up hate speech, with only 38 per cent of the more than 2.5 million posts removed having been spotted by the firm’s technology.

Facebook’s vice president of product management, Guy Rosen, said more work is needed to be done to improve such detection tools.

“We have a lot of work still to do to prevent abuse. 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,” he said.

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“For example, artificial intelligence isn’t good enough yet to determine whether someone is pushing hate or describing something that happened to them so they can raise awareness of the issue.

“In addition, in many areas – whether it’s spam, porn or fake accounts – we’re up against sophisticated adversaries who continually change tactics to circumvent our controls, which means we must continuously build and adapt our efforts.

“It’s why we’re investing heavily in more people and better technology to make Facebook safer for everyone.”

The figures also revealed that Facebook believes between 3 and 4 per cent of its more than 2 billion monthly active users were fake accounts.

The site also said it took down 21 million pieces of nudity and sexual activity-related content, 96 per cent of which was found and flagged by its systems before being reported.

In terms of graphic violent content, Facebook said more than 3.4 million posts were either taken down or given warning labels, 86 per cent of which were spotted by its detection tools.