Facebook released its third content transparency report this week, where the company revealed it has removed 2.2 billion fake accounts in the first quarter of 2019 alone. That figure is up by about a billion from the final quarter of 2018 — indicating a massive influx of bad actors on the platform.

We’ve seen a steep increase in the creation of abusive, fake accounts on Facebook in the last six months,” the company said. “We catch most of these accounts within minutes of registration. However, automated attacks have resulted in more of these accounts making it past our initial detection.”

Overall, Facebook said that about five percent of monthly active users on Facebook at any given time are fake accounts. And while that may not sound like much, it’s a massive raw number for a site with well over 2 billion active users. And that’s the biggest issue facing Facebook. Even when its artificial intelligence successfully catches offensive posts before they hit users’ feeds, it can’t possibly keep up with all of it. Even a 99 percent success rate (which Facebook has previously claimed) means thousands and thousands of bad posts are sneaking through. But, that comes with the territory of being the largest social media platform in the world.

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