Facebook Has Quietly Deleted More Than 3 Billion Accounts
If you've noticed that you have less friends on Facebook in the last 6 months, you are not alone. According to a report from nbcwashington.com, Facebook has doubled the number of fake - and what the company calls abusive accounts. The company has made vast improvements in the way it vets new accounts, and in doing so it has doubled the effectiveness of their campaign to remove hateful, harmful, and just downright fake accounts. In the previous 6 month window, the company removed 1.5 billion accounts.
According to the information Facebook released yesterday, the social media giant has seen a steep increase in the amount of unacceptable accounts. Experts suspect that this is due to computers designed to crank out millions of new accounts that are just subtle variations on the same political or ideological theme. The company estimates that even after a the latest purge, a full 5% (around 119,000) of the 2.4 billion active accounts are fake. Critics of Facebook's vetting practices say that relatively small amount of fake accounts is enough to cause a negative impact on society.