Facebook removes 2.19 billion fake accounts

Facebook deleted 2.19 billion fake accounts in the first quarter of this year. That is a strong increase compared to previous quarters. This is according to Facebook’s Community Standards Enforcement Report.

Fake accounts represented 2 percent of all monthly active users in the last quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019, Facebook estimates. Facebook deleted 583 million fake accounts in the first quarter of 2018, and 1.2 billion fake accounts in the last three months of 2018.

According to Facebook, the surge in the past six months is due to “automated, scripted attacks.” The social network does not immediately expect a decline for the coming quarters. “We expect the number to vary in the near future due to the financial incentive for malicious parties to create fake accounts,” Facebook said in the report.

The company claims to thwart millions of attempts to create fake accounts every day and detect millions more already created fake accounts within minutes. Those numbers are not included in the 2.19 billion deleted fake accounts. Nearly one hundred percent of the deleted accounts have been labeled as ‘fake’ and ‘active in abuse’ by Facebook itself. Only a small part is reported by users.

Facebook uses detection systems that monitor for untrustworthy e-mail addresses, suspicious actions and signals that emerged from previous abuse.

Number of fake accounts deleted per quarter