Facebook boots 3B bogus accounts

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook removed more than 3 billion fake accounts from October to March, twice as many as the previous six months, the company said Thursday.

Nearly all of them were caught before they had a chance to become “active” users of the social network.

In a new report, Facebook said it saw a “steep increase” in the creation of abusive, fake accounts.

While most of these fake accounts were blocked “within minutes” of their creation, the company said this increase of “automated attacks” by bad actors meant not only that it caught more of the fake accounts, but that more of them slipped through the cracks.

As a result, the company estimates 5 percent of its 2.4 billion monthly active users are fake accounts, or about 119 million.

This is up from an estimated 3 percent to 4 percent in the previous six-month report.

The increase shows the challenges Facebook faces in removing accounts created by computers to spread spam, fake news and other objectionable material.

The new numbers come as the company grapples with challenge after challenge, ranging from fake news to Facebook’s role in elections interference, hate speech and incitement to violence in the U.S., Myanmar, India and elsewhere.

Facebook also said Thursday it removed more than 7 million posts, photos and other material because it violated its rules against hate speech.

Facebook employs thousands of people to review posts, photos, comments and videos for violations. Some things also are detected without humans, using artificial intelligence. Both humans and AI make mistakes and Facebook has been accused of political bias as well as ham-fisted removals of posts discussing — rather than promoting — racism.

A thorny issue for Facebook is its lack of procedures for authenticating the identities of those setting up accounts. Only in instances where a user has been booted off the service and won an appeal to be reinstated does it ask to see ID documents.

Dipayan Ghosh, a former Facebook employee and White House tech policy adviser, said absent greater transparency from Facebook, there’s no way of knowing whether its improved automated detection is doing a better job of containing the disinformation problem.