Facebook reveals amount of abusive content removed from social network

Facebook has released internal figures on abusive content found and removed from the site for the first time, revealing the scale of malicious content on the social network.

Under increasing pressure to disclose how it polices itself, Facebook revealed it took down 837 million pieces of spam content between January and March of this year.

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

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

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

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