USA: Facebook says it deleted 3.2 billion fake accounts and 11.4 million hate speeches ahead of presidential election

San Francisco, As the US Presidential election approaches, Facebook said that it has removed more than 3.2 billion fake accounts in the April-September period along with taking action on 11.4 million hate speech posts in the same period.

In total, Facebook removed 5.4 billion fake accounts and 15.5 million hate speech posts since January.

"Over the past two quarters, we have improved our ability to detect and block attempts to create fake, abusive accounts. We can estimate that every day, we prevent millions of attempts to create fake accounts using these detection systems," the social networking giant said on Wednesday.

The majority of such accounts were caught within minutes of registration, before they became a part of Facebook monthly active user (MAU) population.

"Our proactive rate remained above 99 per cent for both quarters. Prevalence for fake accounts continues to be estimated at approximately 5 per cent of our worldwide monthly active users (MAU) on Facebook," said the company.

Earlier this year, Facebook began allowing its hate speech algorithms to begin automatically removing content that violates its policies.

"One result of that decision has been a sharp spike in the amount of hate speech taken off Facebook," said the company.

Facebook said It is using machine learning-based detection technology that can find and flag hate speech using several different methods.

"Starting in Q2 2019, our systems began removing posts automatically when they received very high scores or matched existing hate speech in our database. In all other cases when our systems detect potential hate speech, they send the post to our review team to determine if it should be removed," explained the company.