Facebook removed more than 3 billion fake accounts from October to March, twice as many as the previous six months, the company said Thursday. In a new report, said it saw a "steep increase" in the creation of abusive, fake accounts. While most of these fake accounts were blocked "within minutes" of their creation, the use of computers to generate millions of accounts at a time meant not only that Facebook caught more of the fake accounts, but that more of them slipped through. As a result, the company estimates that 5% of its 2.4 billion monthly active users are fake accounts, or about 119 million. Even as Facebook's detection tools get better, so do the efforts by the creators of these fake accounts.

Source: ABC News May 23, 2019 16:07 UTC