Facebook wiped out over 3 billion fake accounts from October 2018 to March 2019, according to a report released Thursday.
According to the report by the social media network, approximately 5 percent of its 2.38 billion monthly active users are bogus.
“For fake accounts, the amount of accounts we took action on increased due to automated attacks by bad actors who attempt to create large volumes of accounts at one time,” Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president for integrity, said in a blog post.
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This is the largest number wiped out by the social media giant, after the 1.5 billion fake accounts pulled down before October 2018.
During the latest cull, the majority of the fake accounts were detected and removed automatically, according to Facebook.
Facebook also announced that it took action against 1.4 million pieces of content that tried to sell guns and 1.5 million pieces of content that tried to sell drugs.
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In the first three months of 2018, Facebook received 1.1 million appeals from people to reverse their decision, though only 130,000 were restored following these complaints.
Despite using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to detect spammers, results also show that Facebook is still largely reliant on people reporting incidents of bullying and harassment rather than detecting them automatically, with 85.9% from January to March reported by users first.
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