Facebook on Thursday said it disabled over three billion fake accounts between September and March as part of an effort to enforce content standards.
The social networking platform said it disabled 1.2 billion fake accounts in the fourth quarter of 2018 and 2.19 billion in the first quarter of this year.
The company also said it estimated that five per cent of monthly active accounts are fake as it pledged to “continue to find more ways to counter attempts to violate our policies”.
The data is part of Facebook’s third community standards enforcement report.
The category “fake accounts” was one of nine policies in the report.
Among the others are nudity and sexual activity, bullying and harassment, hate speech, global terrorist propaganda and violence and graphic content.
The data show that Facebook took action against about 52 million accounts that dealt with violence and propaganda and 44 million accounts that dealt with adult nudity and sexual activity.
Facebook said the number accounts it took action against increased “due to automated attacks by bad actors who attempt to create large volumes of accounts at one time”.
