As part of the third Community Standards Enforcement report, Facebook included data showing efforts to reduce the number of fake accounts including data from October 2018 until March 2019.
In the report, there was an increased number of fake accounts in the past six months. Facebook has an initial detection process that catches most of these within minutes of their creation.
Between October 2018 and December 2018, there were one billion accounts that Facebook removed. This number doubled from January to March.
Of the accounts were removed, 99.8% of them were found by Facebook before reported by users.
“I think fake accounts can be very misleading and can be a danger to people’s safety,” said Kayla Walters, a junior studying health psychology. “I think it’s a good thing that Facebook has been working to get these fake accounts removed because I had a friend that had a bad experience with someone that had made a fake account.”
With the amount of Facebook users and their process of catching and removing Facebook accounts, they have found that only 5% of monthly active users have fake accounts.
In the Facebook Newsroom, Guy Rosen, the Facebook VP of Integrity, commented on this new report.
“We disabled 1.2 billion accounts in Q4 2018 and 2.19 billion in Q1 2019,” Rosen said. “We’ll continue to find more ways to counter attempts to violate our policies.”
Facebook measures and looks for fake accounts by looking for malicious behavior, as well as suspicious email addresses and flags that can represent false representation or automated attacks.
More criteria for how Facebook finds and measures fake accounts can be found here.
