TOBY SHAPSHAK: Facebook cleans up its act
Clean-up wipes out nearly a quarter of its users, but electioneering is moving to WhatsApp
Facebook has disabled a staggering 583m fake accounts in the first quarter of the year as it tries to rebuild its shattered reputation after the Cambridge Analytica saga and the fallout over user privacy. It is an eye-watering number by any measure, more so because it represents about a quarter of Facebook’s 2.2bn monthly active users. Facebook’s first community standards enforcement report details how it also took down 837m pieces of spam, most of them, it proudly notes, before they were reported. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Facebook’s F8 developer conference this month that the company was one year into a three-year cleanup campaign. In the first three months of this year Facebook took down "21m pieces of adult nudity and sexual activity" and 3.5m pieces of violent content, or applied warning labels to the latter. But it admitted that despite removing 2.5m items of hate speech, "our technology still doesn’t work that well and so it needs to be checked by our review teams". The cleanu...
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.
Subscribe now to unlock this article.
Support BusinessLIVE’s award-winning journalism for R129 per month (digital access only).
There’s never been a more important time to support independent journalism in SA. Our subscription packages now offer an ad-free experience for readers.
Cancel anytime.
Questions? Email helpdesk@businesslive.co.za or call 0860 52 52 00. Got a subscription voucher? Redeem it now.