Facebook and Instagram – a playground of counterfeiters, child molesters, drug dealers and suicides

Facebook and Instagram – a playground of counterfeiters, child molesters, drug dealers and suicides

New York, 18.11.2019

Facebook Inc (FB.O), according to Reuters, removed 3.2 billion fake accounts between April and September this year, along with millions of posts representing child abuse and suicide. This is the finding of the latest Facebook content moderation report published late last week.

This more than doubled the number of fake accounts compared to the same period last year, when 1.55 billion accounts were removed. The report also stresses that Instagram was and is less affected than Facebook by content that needed to be removed.

Although content linked to terrorist organisations was discovered on both networks, with 98.5% of the time on Facebook and 92.2% of the time on Instagram, the Facebook operators had to put more effort into eliminating it.

In the third quarter, more than 11.6 million content representing the nudity and sexual exploitation of children on Facebook was removed. Instagram had 754,000 content.

Law enforcement agencies are concerned that Facebook plans to offer users more privacy by encrypting messaging services. The FBI warns that this would hinder efforts to combat child abuse. FBI Director Christopher Wray recently predicted the consequences of these changes: it would turn the platforms into a „dream come true for predators and child pornographers“.

For the first time Facebook also mentioned data on self-inflicted injuries in the report. According to the report, in the third quarter alone 2.5 million reports of self-harm and suicide should have been removed. Faceook also had to react to drug sales attempts – this was necessary in at least 4.4 million cases.