Facebook is Being Misleading - Again.

Facebook is running ads on the New York Times' The Daily Podcast and various other major media outlets, claiming to “lead the industry in stopping bad actors online.” The ad claims Facebook moderators “have taken down 1.7 billion fake accounts” in just the past few months. Here’s why this is misleading.

For years, Facebook has disclosed its estimates of fake accounts, but its figures are confusing. The company admitted in an Oct 2019 securities filing that “duplicate and false accounts are very difficult to measure at our scale,” and that the actual numbers “may vary significantly from our estimates.”

In the past, Facebook has claimed to have taken 90% of the fake accounts on its site. Assuming these numbers are honest and accurate, that's still 170 million ACTIVE fake accounts currently on their platform.

The vast majority of these fake accounts taken down are bots, which is easier for Facebook's AI to detect than fake accounts created by individuals posing as real people. Fake accounts reported by users have a much lower removal rate.

Bryan Denny, an ACCO member, has personal experience with this. For years, his identity has been stolen and used by romance scammers despite continuously reporting to Facebook all the fake accounts using personal information and photos.

This estimate also doesn't include hacked accounts, which try to scam a user's friends for money or spread disinformation. Some users have had to take drastic measures such as buying an Oculus in order to reach Facebook's customer service and recover their accounts.

Tackling fake accounts is an important step towards stopping organized crime on Facebook platforms, and it's disappointing to see the company claim success when it shouldn't. Instead of making the structural and algorithmic changes necessary to reduce illicit content on their platforms, the firm has fallen back on their old playbook of only responding to problems when exposed by the media.

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