Facebook deleted 1.3 billion fake accounts in Oct-Dec 2020

Facebook has said that it's removed 1.3 billion "fake accounts" between just October and December of 2020, with over 35,000 people working on sorting through misinformation on the largest social network in the world.

But it's not just the 1,300,000,000 fake Facebook accounts that were deleted, but over 12 million pieces of content regarding COVID-19 and vaccines that were flagged by global health experts as misinformation have also been removed. Guy Rosen explained on an official FB blog post: "Let's start with fake accounts. We take a hard line against this activity and block millions of fake accounts each day, most of them at the time of creation".

He continued: "Between October and December of 2020, we disabled more than 1.3 billion of them. We also investigate and take down covert foreign and domestic influence operations that rely on fake accounts. Over the past three years, we've removed more than 100 networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior from our platform and keep the public informed about our efforts through our monthly CIB reports".

Facebook says it had 2.8 billion monthly active users (MAUs) in Q4 2020, with the social networking giant estimating that the 1.3 billion deleted fake accounts made up just 5% of their MAUs in that same time frame.

You can read more about this story on the official Facebook blog.