fake accounts

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  • Facebook logo displayed on a phone screen and a keyboard are seen in this multiple exposure illustration photo taken in Poland on February 8, 2021. Facebook reacted negatively to Apple's privacy policy changes. (Photo illustration by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

    Facebook banned an Albanian troll farm supporting exiled Iranian militants

    Facebook took down more than 1,000 fake accounts in March, including a few hundred that were tied to a troll farm in Albania.

    Karissa Bell
    04.06.2021
  • NurPhoto via Getty Images

    Facebook reveals the AI tool it used to ban 6.6 billion fake accounts

    Today, Facebook unveiled a machine learning tool that, in the last year, has removed more than six billion fake accounts. That's in addition to the millions of new fake accounts that Facebook blocks from being created daily. According to Facebook, the tool has been in production for two years and it's one of the most advanced methods Facebook has for fighting bogus accounts.

    Christine Fisher
    03.04.2020
  • bombuscreative via Getty Images

    Twitter admits 'bad actors' exploited phone number matching feature

    Twitter has revealed that it has discovered and suspended accounts abusing a feature that allowed users to match phone numbers with usernames. By announcing the privacy issue, it's also confirming the flaw discovered by security researcher Ibrahim Balic in December 2019. Balic found that Twitter's Android app had a vulnerability that allowed him to match 17 million phone numbers with their respective accounts. While you can look up contacts using their phone numbers on the platform, Twitter says matching a massive amount of numbers with accounts goes "beyond [the feature's] intended use case."

    Mariella Moon
    02.03.2020
  • Motortion via Getty Images

    Alphabet subsidiary Jigsaw paid a Russian troll to spread disinformation

    In the name of research, Alphabet subsidiary Jigsaw and a partner security firm paid a Russian troll $250 for a disinformation campaign. As Wired reports, the experiment was meant to prove how easy it is to purchase social media propaganda campaigns. But the experiment has attracted plenty of critics.

    Christine Fisher
    06.12.2019
  • Justin Sullivan via Getty Images

    Facebook has taken down over 2 billion fake accounts in 2019

    Facebook took down 2.19 billion fake accounts during the first quarter of 2019, the company has announced. In addition to that, Facebook said it disabled 1.2 billion fake accounts in Q4 2018. These numbers are quite staggering when you consider that Facebook has 2.38 billion monthly active users, as reported in its Q1 2019 earnings. "For fake accounts," Facebook said in a blog post, "the amount of accounts we took action on increased due to automated attacks by bad actors who attempt to create large volumes of accounts at one time."

    Edgar Alvarez
    05.23.2019