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Facebook’s quest against the menace of fake news is yielding pretty handsome fruits. The online social media giant on Thursday said that it deactivated more than 3 billion fake accounts between October and March. The platform also managed to remove seven million ‘hate speeches posts,’ which is a record-breaking number.
Facebook succeeded in removing almost all these fake accounts even before they become activated. However, the popular social platform admits in equal breadth that millions of fake accounts may have slipped through its tight scrutiny. The company broadly estimates that at present nearly 5% of its 2.4 billion monthly active users are fake accounts.
Facebook uses cutting edge technology like artificial intelligence (AI) along with vast team spread across the entire globe to pursue their fight against fake news. Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims that his company’s well-entrenched system is capable of detecting fake accounts and posts in 40 different languages. He also added that this year Facebook’s budget to fight against fake account will be more than Twitter’s entire annual revenue.
Commenting over the role of AI, Justin Osofsky, head of Facebook’s global operations team said, “AI has really changed the game when it comes to detecting violating content. But what it still can’t do well is to understand context, and context is key when evaluating things like hate speech.”
“A slur for instance is often an attack on someone based on race, national origin or sexual orientation — but it can sometimes be a joke, one used self-referentially or could be employed to raise awareness about the bigotry someone has experienced,” he added.
Over the last few years popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp have been continuously facing flaks for their inability to curtail fake news and hate posts. These fake news and hate posts usually permeated through computer generated bots have played decisive role in influencing elections in several countries, experts claim.
As a result, government across the world have been putting pressure on Facebook and its other counterparts to crack down on fake accounts.
