Facebook banned 1.7 billion fake accounts in Q1 2020, the company revealed on its transparency dashboard. That's the second largest number of fake account deletions in a single quarter since Facebook started reporting the numbers. The company said that 99.7% of these accounts were flagged by Facebook automatically before users ever needed to report them to the company manually. Since late 2017 (which is the period starting which this data has been published), that number has never been smaller than 98%. In 2019, the company said that its 2.2 billion peak was largely due to simplistic attacks by hackers that created millions of fake accounts at the same time that the company immediately shut down. It's likely that similar dynamics are at play here. [caption id="attachment_214642" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Facebooks fake account takedowns (Source)[/caption] Hate speech hits new records The company removed 9.6 million "pieces of content" that violated hate speech rules, a huge leap from the previous quarter, when the company took similar action for 5.7 million pieces of content. This number generally trends upwards, and so does the percentage of the content that Facebook discovers automatically — in Q1, 11.3% of the removed hate speech content was reported by users, the rest being detected by the company automatically. The share of user-reported hate speech is also shrinking — the 19.8% of content was flagged manually in the previous quarter. [caption id="attachment_214640" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Facebook's Hate Speech takedowns (Source)[/caption] Other community standards enforcement stats For other types of content and…
