Facebook Shuts Down 1 Million Accounts Per Day. Image Source: PensionDanmark

Facebook Shuts down 1 Million Accounts Per Day

Facebook is probably the most popular social networking site worldwide, with a global usage penetration of 22.9 percent. Facebook can be a huge black hole filled with nonsense and unimportant chatter. Mark Zuckerberg’s social networks i.e. Facebook shuts down 1 million accounts every single day. But even while removing that many problematic accounts, the company is still struggling to stop spam, fraud, and hate speech.

This is according to Facebook’s security chief, Alex Stamos, who appeared at a conference, saying that he believes in the uprightness of the spam, fraud and hate speech policies currently in place but they are struggling with the large scale of execution.

“When you’re dealing with millions and millions of interactions, you can’t create these rules and enforce them without false positives,” Stamos explains. The conference was part of the Enigma Interviews, a series of cyber security discussions sponsored by the Advanced Computing Systems Association, better known as USENIX.

Stamos blames the pure technical challenges in enforcing the company’s rules –rather than the rules themselves –for the threatening and unsafe behavior that sometimes finds its way on to the site. He then confirmed that Facebook shuts down 1 million accounts every day, as per the sources.

Over 2 billion people are on Facebook i.e. more than a quarter of the world’s population. Facebook being one of the most popular social networking sites, also comes with fraudsters who create thousands of fake accounts at once making it hard to catch the so called “threat actors”. Due to the struggle, many posts that don’t violate the social network’s rules are often mistakenly removed.

Facebook has long been criticized for its inability to police its own content after violent deaths and live streams of suicides were broadcast. Eva Galperin, director of cyber security at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocated for free speech online, also spoke at the event, saying that the removal of accounts and content on the site is biased. “The work of Facebook take down teams is not transparent. The rules are not enforced across the board –they reflect biases,” she said.

Stamos pushed back during the discussion, saying “it’s not just a bunch of white guys” who make decisions about what posts to remove. “When you turn up the volume on hate speech, you’ll get false positives, and catch people who are just talking about it rather than promoting it,” Stamos said adding “the definition of hate speech in some countries is problematic.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the company will hire 3,000 extra workers to monitor and remove the offensive contents.

That effort continues apace, according to Stamos, who said the company is “massively expanding their team to track threat actors.”

He explained that the company is planning to expand the team who work on this counter-operation but there is only so much that humans can be expected to do, and some must be delegated to artificial intelligence software.

So, this is why Facebook shuts down 1 million accounts every single day. Thanks for taking a few moments of your time to read this; if you like this information, please share it with your friends and do comment below!

 

Reference: Huffpost