Facebook eliminates false accounts at a rate of one million daily and "sometimes just at the time they are created," says its operations director.
The director of operations of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, ensures that the company eliminates false accounts from its main social network at a daily rate of one million. This means that Facebook can erase in 37 days the number of new users who reported between the second and third quarter of 2018 (37 million); or, failing that, that many of your user numbers are inflated by false accounts.
"We are blocking more than one million false accounts every day, sometimes just at the moment they are created," Sandberg said this week during his speech at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich, Germany. His presentation is part of the strategy adopted by the technology now to convince the world that Facebook has already learned its lesson and deserves redemption.
But the numbers offered by Facebook tend to cause more confusion than understanding. In September, Sandberg told the US Senate intelligence committee that Facebook eliminated 1.3 billion false accounts between October 2017 and March 2018, after founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had celebrated the 2 billion users in July 2018. .
The US organization for transparency Plainsite says in a study published this week that, in reality, Facebook has consistently lied to the public and that it is possible that more than 50% of the accounts of the social network are false. "Their official metrics are contradictory and even ridiculous," the report reads.
Plainsite accuses Facebook of fraud, considering that lying about the amount of false accounts is a deception to advertisers, who believe that their advertising reaches 2,000 million human beings. In addition, it ensures that many fake accounts click on ads to make up the plot, defrauding advertisers and injecting income into the social network.
How many Facebook accounts are false?
If a year ago the social network was eliminating 1.300 million false accounts and then communicate that it had exceeded the milestone of the 2 billion users (2.271 million according to the latest data), did the company then admit that half of the profiles are false ? Many times, Facebook numbers simply do not close, and the same happens with the latest figures presented by Sandberg.
The mathematics of Zuckerberg's surroundings could become an unprecedented science, because of the many doubts that they sow. As Siva Vaidhyanathan questioned in an opinion of The New York Times, "how many false accounts were there before Facebook established this aggressive defense in 2017?" - (Remember that it was in 2017 when multiple scandals broke out in the face of the dome).
Although Sandberg said in Germany that Facebook now has 30,000 workers in moderation work (three times more than in 2017), most of this work is carried out by artificial intelligence. Therefore, the executive announced the donation of 7.5 million dollars to create an ethical institute of artificial intelligence.
"One thing is clear: this is an absurd battle of machine against machine," Vaidhyanathan wrote at the time. "A set of machines creates fake accounts, another clears them, this happens millions of times every month, and no group of human beings has the time to create millions, let alone billions, of Facebook accounts by hand."
"If you want to know what a company cares about, you have to see its expenses," Sandberg said. "We are spending billions of dollars a year on security," he added. Then, he admitted that the technology recognizes that an era of regulations for digital platforms is approaching, and affirmed that Facebook would support the "correct" restrictions