San Francisco (AFP)
Facebook said Wednesday have deleted 5.4 billion fake user accounts since the beginning of the year, against 2.1 billion last year at the same time.
In its bi-annual report on transparency, the social networking giant says it has "improved its ability to detect and block" the creation of accounts "false or abusive" to the point of preventing millions of attempts every day.
From January to March, Facebook claims to have deleted 2.2 billion accounts, a record.
"As we block more and more false accounts even before they are created, we have fewer and fewer to disable, and our interventions have decreased since the first quarter," said the firm Menlo Park.
The deletions still remained at very high levels.
After manipulation operations in the US elections of 2016, mainly orchestrated from Russia, Facebook and other social platforms have reacted with an arsenal of measures gradually deployed since 2018 to fight against false accounts and misinformation, both in content shared by users only in advertisements.
The mainstream network is also stepping up efforts, including transparency, to restore trust with its users, particularly to governments seeking to exercise greater control over its applications and data.
This report indicates that the US authorities have made more than 50,000 queries to obtain data from Facebook users from January to June 2019, a figure that is up 23% over the previous semester.
In the majority of cases, these are legal requests, based on court decisions, but they can also be "emergencies".
"If a request seems unjustified or too broad, we defend ourselves and fight it in the courts if necessary." We do not provide "back doors" + opening up on people's information, "insists Facebook.
In the first half, government requests grew by 16% to more than 128,000 in all, with India and the United Kingdom in second and third place, followed by Germany and France.
© 2019 AFP