Facebook removed more than 2 billion fake accounts already this year

The Fake account problem for Facebook is getting bigger and bigger.

Now the company has to remove more Facebook account that they ever did. In their transparency report for 2019, Facebook revealed that they have already removed more than 2 billion fake accounts form their server.

According to the executives of Facebook, there has been a spike in the creation of more fake Facebook account as compared to the past few years. In the first quarter of 2019 alone, Facebook removed nearly 2.19 billion fake accounts which are double the amount of 1.8 billion fake accounts which the company removed back in the last quarter of 2018.

The VP of Integrity for Facebook, Guy Rosen said, “This rise is due to spammers as well as bad actors who are trying to create a large volume of fake accounts at one time.”

Rosen also pointed out the fact that as soon as the majority of those fake accounts were created, the company was able to remove them automatically. He said, “these numbers are largely due to automated attacks and most of these fake accounts were removed within minutes of they were created.”

As for Facebook, they claim that they have successfully removed nearly 99.8 percent of their fake accounts even before being reported by the users.

Many have raised their concern about the Facebook metrics to not timely detect out these fake accounts upon their creation. To this Facebook had acknowledged that a sizeable number of these fake accounts do get to evade their filters. Facebook also admits to the fact that 5 percent of their total monthly account base is made up of fake accounts. To put this in comparison, consider this; Facebook had nearly 2.375 billion active users on a monthly basis for the 1st quarter of 2019. Out of them, nearly 118 million were fake accounts.

These numbers do point out to the fact that how massive this problem has grown into since just last year.

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