Facebook banned a whopping 2.2 billion fake accounts in Q1 2019 — almost twice as much as the previous quarter (FB)

Rob Price

May 23, 2019 5:50 PM

Facebook banned a staggering 2.2 billion fake accounts in the first three months of 2019 almost as many as the total number of real people who use the social network.

mark zuckerberg protest fake accounts face

On Thursday, the Silicon Valley tech giant released the third edition of its Community Standards Enforcement report , a public report that details the company's efforts to keep its platform clear of fake accounts, abusive material, illegal activity, spam, and other nefarious content.

It details a striking jump in the number of fake accounts it took action against: 2.19 billion were banned in Q1 2019, up from 1.2 billion in Q4 2018. In a blog post, VP of Integrity Guy Rosen wrote of this trend: "The amount of accounts we took action on increased due to automated attacks by bad actors who attempt to create large volumes of accounts at one time."

The data illustrates the sheer volume of malicious activity still ongoing on Facebook's platform: It has 2.38 billion genuine monthly active users in total on the social network.

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