Facebook Says It’s Blocking A Million Accounts Per Day To Safeguard Election

Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook received overwhelming criticism from lawmakers and the public for allowing its platform to be used as a tool to spread misinformation. Now, it seems as though the social media giant doesn’t want to make the same mistake twice. According to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, the company is removing over a million accounts a day to protect users from this politically harmful spam.

“We’re very focused on taking down fake accounts,” Sandberg said in an interview with Yahoo! Finance. “We now take down over a million a day — blocked before anyone can see them — because of all the things that went wrong last time [during the 2016 presidential election] under fake accounts.”

Sandberg went on to say that, in 2016, the company failed to recognize “coordinated inauthentic behavior” on its platform. These misinformation campaigns often originate with hostile foreign powers like Russia or Iran who are looking to destabilize the U.S. electoral process. (The company also recently announced that it took down a network of fake accounts and pages from the same Russian bad actors who struck in 2016.) While Facebook will never have a perfect track record of removing harmful content, it’s encouraging to see how much progress the company has made in just four years.




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