Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, pictured earlier this month in France, told reporters on Thursday that the tech giant is making nice strides in fighting hate speech and crime online.
Facebook says it removed 3.39 billion fake accounts from October to March. That’s double the amount of fraudulent
accounts deleted in the previous
six-month period.
In the company’s latest Community
Standards enforcement Report, released Thursday, Facebook said nearly
all of the fake accounts
were caught by AI and more human observation. They also attributed the
skyrocketing variety to
“automated attacks by bad actors who attempt to create massive volumes of accounts
at one time.”
The fake accounts
are roughly a billion over the 2.4 billion actual people on Facebook
worldwide, in line with the
company’s own count.
“Most of those accounts were blocked within minutes of their creation before they could do any damage,” Facebook chief executive officer Mark
Zuckerberg told reporters in a call on Thursday.
While acknowledging that Facebook “knows
that there’s tons of labor ahead,”
Zuckerberg also touted
the company’s progress in curbing hate
speech and graphic violence across the platform.
“We are progressively catching it before people report it to us,” he said,
adding that 65% of the
hate speech on the site was
removed before any users alerted the
corporate. That’s a rise from about 24% a year ago,
Zuckerberg said.
During the same period,
Facebook identified about 83 of posts and comments making an attempt to sell drugs, before the
corporate was informed regarding them, he added.
Facebook is facing variety of controversies on its platform together with election
interference, misinformation and
privacy concerns. And a
growing range of
critics, together with politicians
and one of its
co-founders are calling for the corporate to be broken up. They argue Facebook, which has acquired Instagram and WhatsApp
in recent years, wields far too much power and incorporates a monopoly in the business (Facebook is among NPR’s financial supporters).
Chris Hughes, who co-founded the
corporate in 2004, told NPR earlier this month that Zuckerberg
“is unaccountable.”
“He’s unaccountable to his shareholders. He’s
unaccountable to his users, and he’s unaccountable to government. And I assume that that’s basically un-American. And I suppose government should step up, break up the corporate and regulate
it,” he said.
He added that the corporate “totally
dominates the social networking area.”
“Of every dollar that’s
spent on ads and social networking, 84 goes to Facebook,” Hughes said. “If you check up on the time spent
on the site, you
know, the average user
is spending an hour on Facebook and
another 53 minutes on
Instagram, not to mention
what they’re spending on
WhatsApp.”
Dipayan Ghosh, co-director of the Platform accountability Project at Harvard
University’s Kennedy school, previously served as Facebook’s
privacy and policy adviser.
“Without some form of public
transparency into steps the
corporate takes to take down nefarious accounts, we should not conclude it’s doing
enough,” he told NPR.
But on Thursday, Zuckerberg argued the new report is proof of the company’s efforts to
be clearer. He additionally declared that breaking up Facebook would only make it tougher to
quash fake news and
phony accounts across the site.