Facebook, Aiming for Transparency, Details Removal of Posts and Fake Accounts

Should make the ad buyers and investors wonder how many accounts are left after they remove the fakes and inactives...

Ok, I’m at wits end. I was notified that my Facebook page was temporarily suspended due to some hacking attempt (which sounds suspicious) however the message stated I must change my password but I must post my old password which I don’t recall. There is no email address nor any other means to communicate. Do you have an address to reach Facebook?

Facebook disabled my seldom used, but legitimate account, presumably deciding that lack of use spells illegitimacy.

I've had a Facebook post automatically removed (an article about how sex ed classes in France now include info on the clitoris), and I've reported hate speech to Facebook that they declined to remove (a trans friend of mine was running for school board in their town, and one comment on their post about why they decided to run for the school board said "Kill it with fire." Multiple people reported that comment and Facebook sent us all polite messages saying thanks for reporting, but it doesn't violate Facebook's content policy. I must also admit that I've been blocked by Mark Zuckerberg -- I used to tag him occasionally in articles that highlighted concerns about Facebook's privacy policy, and he apparently did not appreciate the commentary from this local librarian.

583 million out of a total 2 billion user accounts were removed as fake. And then the company says that 3 to 4 percent remaining accounts are fake. This sounds suspicious or at least misleading. If Facebook can remove hundreds of millions of accounts, why can't it remove the small percentage that remain? Anyways, the huge number of fake accounts really diminishes the value of Facebook. Investors should be outraged. We need to have a critical eye on how Facebook and other websites as well use number of users as a metric for growth.

Accidentally on purpose.

Does anyone know how I can delete and get rid of my Facebook account? The elimination of "hate speech" and "fake"accounts will be, I suspect, a censoring of those not conforming to the political correctness philosophy of the Facebook executives.

583 million fake accounts? Yet my fake account remains despite no effort on my part to make it seem legitimate. I have always suspected they knew what was going on but didn’t want to tell the public the real numbers.

Every time I see that stupid “Here Together” commercial, I want to put my fist through the screen. I wish I could travel back to 2014 and stop myself from deleting my profile so that I could delete it now in protest.

News about of it network .This resource that share it network not is important to me, delete facebook .

Two years too late.

Let's see what will happen, is not what the politicians and so-called left-wing Brazilian intellectuals expected. They wanted to shut up, of them who critic them.

Nothing like letting the Fox guard the henhouse. I just learned from George Strait that Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg have decided Facebook will sell all its oceanfront property in Arizona to raise cash.

FYI facebook my fake accounts which I use only because I cannot comment on some newspapers without doing it through Facebook are still functioning nicely. As a 101 year old man living in Barundi I use fb not the other way around.

"Of the accounts that remained, the company said that 3 to 4 percent were fake." That's not at all what the report says. The report says that "[w]e estimate that fake accounts represented approximately 3% to 4% of monthly active users (MAU) on Facebook during Q1 2018 and Q4 2017." It goes on to say that they've deleted 1.4 billion accounts over the course of Q4 2017 and Q1 2018. If one has actually been following this newspaper's own reporting on Facebook, one would know that on September 6, 2017 Facebook reported that their ads could reach more young people in the US than even exists by a factor of one-third. (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/business/media/facebook-advertisers.h... Facebook's numbers are fictitious. If only we had journalists or politicians that understood this, called them out on it, and forced them to actually account for the reality that their business is largely build on ad fraud.

Stop treating Zuckerberg Facebook like a neutral observer. Read up on their boss, and remember that much of this "deletion" drive[1] is aimed at people who they feel they haven't sufficiently Real Name-harassed. Those marketing-NOT-tech guys are putin, not the UN—and have the Russian contacts and money to prove it. The former C'Analytica, and their owners Robert Merciless and family, haven't suddenly forgot who you are since Facebook deliberately handed them info in their not-"breach" and then Zuck dressed up in his Sunday-Congress-bribery best to say "sorry" over and over for getting caught. Don't lump "nudity" with the others, unless it's without the pictured person's consent—often it's innocuous stuff like medical self-exams or breastfeeding (that should elicit shrugs, at most, in 2018), or perhaps the rare ad for sex work (that should be legal, at least, in 2018). Not that I have evidence that it's mostly those things; I deleted an account I had there long, long ago, and block it where it infests. You should too. [1] You just KNOW they're keeping those accounts anyway, for Russopublican "research". With pseudonymous accounts, they can learn how to pretend to be human.

People must be deleting their Facebook accounts (or trying) left and right because now I am seeing these quaint yet laughable ads on t.v. for Facebook. So, Mark Zuckerberg sells info to Obama and Trump, allows fake news on his site, seems to be involved with Russians meddling in an election and NOW he wants me to believe that he will do better? Because he got caught?

Useless. The key problem is that it's almost impossible to tell real posts of rabid Trump supporters from the bot-manufactured Russian ones, they are equally frothing with rage and incoherence. Look for an uptick in June as we move into midterm primaries.

Why is nobody talking about the drastic reduction in total users if 600 million accounts out of 2 billion are cut?

I was a regular FB user. 2.5 weeks ago, I deactivated my FB account because I could no longer make excuses for its behavior and I felt disgusted with myself for having trusted FB and sharing so much personal information. I blame no one but myself. Leaving was a great decision! I have more time available; I am having more meaningful communications with friends; and a have much better attitude, among many other benefits. More importantly, I am no longer subjecting myself to toxic levels of political leftist and conservative drivel.

Exempting internet publishers from liability for user posts was a catastrophic mistake. Continuing to exempt them on the grounds that the publisher made a shallow PR gesture to demonstrate that they dislike offensive posts would be another catastrophic mistake. Freedom of speech requires suppression of speech that shuts down free speech ... every bit as much as free exercise of religion requires prohibitions on establishment of a religion.

From about November last year to February of this year, my wife was a FB contractor as a "data reviewer". We joked that we could thank Trump's election for her job there. Anyway, she was on a large team comprised of people reviewing event postings and the like, determining if they were fake or not. The team consisted of people who spoke European and East Asian languages. Her focus was postings in Indonesia (where she's from), but they also had her review postings from Germany. The problem was she knows about as much German as me (none!). Most of the Indonesian posts she reviewed were related to Muslim fundamentalism. She got depressed reading so many posts filled with hatred and bigotry, although she ended up leaving not because of that but for a better job opportunity elsewhere. She also felt very insecure in that job because she felt like she was helping improve a system that would make her position obsolete. The challenge FB and its AI have, at least in regards to Indonesia, is Indonesians mix the official language (Indonesian) with their "native" language (for example, Javanese) when both speaking and informally writing, so FB and Google translate do an awful job translating Indonesians' postings. I suspect that other places in the world have similar challenges for FB.

Imagine, for a moment, that FB hadn't had its feet held to the fire by users, the media and Congress. Those 865-million posts would still be floating amongst the other internet effluent -- and 583 million accounts would still be flourishing. They are grappling to stay in business and this is nothing more or less than a massive PR effort...

Removing dubious posts from Facebook is itself dubious and the beginning of the slippery slope to censorship. Who decides what's dubious and in what context? What's considered acceptable varies by country and Facebook is worldwide (except where banned completely). Some of the problems could be avoided by; 1. Properly validating users, so they know which country they belong to. 2. Allowing sharing of posts only between users validated to be in the same country. 3. Allowing links in posts only to websites on a "white list" (and they, for example YouTube, would then be responsible for their own content). This isn't perfect but it's a start and there's no practical way to fix the problem if Facebook users are effectively anonymous. If implemented properly it doesn't seem like it would have much impact on communication between friends or Facebook's advertising (though the latter has separate problems of its own). It also doesn't really restrict freedom of speech in the US; it just restricts it to people in the US. That won't, of course, stop lawyers arguing the opposite on behalf of their clients and against common sense (see Citizens United).

This sounds like Facebook is posturing to allay user revolt. However, I don't see it as really doing much. Unless they are willing to give their users complete control over the content they create, and respect the fact that they do not wish to be advertised to, unless there is a specific opt in, this is nothing more than empty folders on a table.

I applaud some steps but the larger question remains: how do they determine what gets removed and why? Facebook should do all it can to delete false accounts and content that violates their terms. But beyond that, I see it like any other business that can be manipulated in some way: it happens. For example, anyone can write a letter to a newspaper (when that was relevant) with a fake identity; people can use the telephone pretending to be someone else; credit card information can stolen--which has a much larger potential impact than data from Facebook. Yet we don't/didn't call for The New York Times or AT&T, or Visa to be shut down.

Nothing like letting the Fox guard the henhouse. As George Strait effectively prophesied long ago, all the bad publicity has prompted Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg to have Facebook sell its oceanfront property in Arizona to raise cash.

What a charade. All social media vehicles are Robber Baron Investor owned. They aren't going to do one thing to "clean it up" and plug their money pipeline. If anything, they have gotten even more invasive. WE THE PEOPLE must demand that they be broken up into small companies and strictly regulated for OUR privacy - like the U.S. Post Office. NOW is the time to elect/hire socially conscious women and men who have the courage to protect 99% of us from the Investor Robber Barons.

We need to know who accounts really belong to. Just make everyone’s identity and money a matter of public record. That would be a good place to start. Veiled identities and secret money are at the base of all of our problems. Privacy is just a trick to keep all of the beneath board a secret.

May be it is time for Facebook to rename itself Fakebook. At least that will be consistent with its past accomplishments and perhaps its future promises.

I don't believe that Facebook is suddenly angelic. When I had an account, I was always offered ad links to fake news stories about celebrity deaths that led into virus-loading web sites that I avoided with great care. When I noted this to Facebook and asked that those ads posing as news be blocked their response was to have more appear since I was obviously aware of the ads. I hated everything about Facebook and do not participate - for my own good. If they have millions of fake accounts they obviously have been allowing them and encouraging them for a long time - it makes the company look to be very successful at roping in suckers.

At one time a few months ago, way before the Facebook revelations of the misuse of personal data, I searched for Larry Page on Facebook. Larry Page, the real one, is the famous co-founder of Google. This was just out of curiosity. as I don't know anyone named Larry Page. I just wanted to see how Facebook handled quasi-celebrities or just well-known people that aren't performers and don't have fan clubs. There were about 10 Larry Pages pages that showed up using the real Larry Page's photo. Some of the pages purporting to belong to the famous Larry Page went further and had a bio that matched the bio of the real Larry Page. Clearly, there were a lot of fake profiles on Facebook. So I reported them to Facebook. I got the usual robotic boilerplate reply from Facebook weeks later, but back then they never actually removed the profiles using the Google co-founder's image and bio. After the exposure of Cambridge Analytica and the Russian professor selling millions of Facebook users profile data to help elect Trump, maybe Facebook has decided to replace the robot responders will a real staff of human beings who will actually get serious about removing fake profiles and fake news stories.

I'd love to know whether it's AI or a human being at Facebook that continues to allow conspiracy pushers to thrive on the platform, including those who insist that mass school shootings (e.g. Sandy Hook and Florida) were somehow faked. C'mon, Mr. Zuckerberg. You can do so much better than this.

I've reported about a dozen fake profiles and Facebook hasn't removed any of them. After their 'investigation', they simply suggest I block the user and that they didn't have sufficient reason to block them. The russian bots are still in full force.

I am a 62 year old woman who has been getting as many as 3 or 4 friend requests from what is pretty obviously fake accounts. Age appropriate good looking men with no mutual friends and lots of self portrait selfies. I am not so sure what they are doing it is working that well. They need to dig a little deeper. I can't imagine what a 30 year old is getting!

Frankly, I still don't see the point of Facebook beyond narcissism and advertising, which is at best irritating but more often obnoxious and imbecilic. I have too many better things to do with my days and take my privacy too seriously to be part of Facebook.

583 million accounts, at one per person, is over 8% of the roughly seven billion people in the world. How is this only 3-4% of their active accounts?

Too little too late. Anything For A Buck Zuck and the amoral "social network" he built only react AFTER they caught. FB is either fully aware of everything that has ever taken place in its network or this is the most incompetently run tech company there is since its leadership claims to not know about all of this stuff. BTW FB has NO way to directly contact them if you have a problem. For example, I am NOT ALLOWED TO DELETE OR DISABLE my account. According to FB the only way to deal with this is to send them a letter via U.S. Mail.

Facebook's efforts at accountability are a lot of "too little too late." Zuckerberg's testimony before Congress was a sad public effort to remove Facebook from culpability regarding its business plan; Zuckerberg's lack of transparency during his testimony frustrated me. Surely, I thought, a business owner would know whether his company was taking non-Facebook information from Facebook accountholders' phones. Three weeks ago, I closed my nine-year-old Facebook account. Before doing so, I downloaded a Facebook-generated archive of my account -- the posts, contacts, friends, photos, timeline, security and so on. From the archive, I learned that what Facebook called my "contacts" included more than a thousand persons whose names (and other information) had been stored on my cell phones (not on my Facebook account) during that timeframe. I also learned that Facebook had allowed 350 entities, businesses and organizations -- including 148 political organizations -- to upload my contact list. The way the heading is phrased is ambiguous: "Advertisers who uploaded a contact list with your info." Does this mean Facebook sorted out my personal contact information from the thousand-plus names on that list, or does it mean that Facebook sold the entire thousand-plus names on the contact list to groups like Americans for Prosperity-Utah and Carl2018? I am assuming the latter. Oddly, the contact list didn't include the names of my Facebook friends. It's too late for transparency.

Facebook Reps walked into Obama campaign HQ in California and said "we'll allow you guys more access to our client's data than anyone else because we're on your side." Regardless of party this should be chilling to all. What if the government forces Zuckerberg to sell and the Kochs buy Facebook and the shoe is on the other foot?

If I were an advertiser, I’d be more than curious to know how much of my ad spend was going to known fake accounts … something like a quarter of all Facebook accounts. I’d be willing to bet that the currently identified fake accounts aren’t the extent of the problem and that there’s more iceberg under the water.

I am here to assure all of you that if you have a landline, a cell phone, email, paper and pen, a camera, Skype or Facetime, etc you can live a perfectly happy life without Facebook and still keep in touch with friends and family.

583 million Facebook accounts were removed? Isn't that a pretty significant percentage (like ~25%) of their overall account volume? Suggests to me that the depth of the "fake activity" penetration may very well be deeper than we realized. Is anyone safe on this platform?

Facebook's real problem is they have zero contact with their users. That is ironic for a company built on pulling people together. You cannot call or email a Facebook staffer. The only reporting method is to fill out a form with no guarantee of a response. I have filled out dozens without ever getting a personal response. This week I had 3 friend requests from good looking widowed guys with excellent jobs. Isn't it odd that a Medicare aged dog rescuer with a bad haircut would attract this demographic? "Handsome younger athletic guy with money to burn, looking for a grandmother!" Here are the red flags: 1) Contacted me. 2) Page is only gorgeous selfies. 3) Drill down you find links to foreign language groups. Facebook told me there was nothing wrong with these profiles, but thanks for being cautious and reporting them. Don't get me started on how Facebook seems to be at war with animal rescuers. I knew dozens of rescuers suspended each week during hurricane season. I reached out every way I could trying to talk with a Facebook representative. After years of helping out online with animals during disasters, many of us will no longer do that. I have an online non-profit and I must be on Facebook. I cannot risk being suspended for starting a private training group and posting my own content to it, as happened during Harvey. I live on the Gulf Coast, and I belong to a group of social media experts who work disasters, but that work is now over for me.

I’m not sure Facebook knows who I am. I’m white but get targeted with ads directed at African Americans. I can only assume it’s because I don’t post selfies and have a bunch of black friends.