Facebook is still trying to make up for the massive whoopsie it admitted to earlier this year, when a Trump campaign-backed organization called Cambridge Analytica made off with the private data of 87 million people and Facebook did virtually nothing about it. CEO Mark Zuckerberg endured a Congressional testimony, the site released a touching commercial about doing more to regain your trust after “something happened” with “data misuse,” and now Facebook has announced that its attempt to get things back on the right track has involved deleting 583 million fake accounts and more than 20 million “pieces of violent or obscene content” (including hate speech, nudity, and pro al-Qaeda or ISIS content) just in the first three months of 2018.
That comes from The Washington Post, which says Facebook released the numbers to show that it’s making progress in the “gargantuan task” it’s facing in trying to fix its many issues. The story says that a lot of the removals were courtesy of new AI technology that Facebook is utilizing, with “more than 96 percent” of the deleted content getting flagged by software before users could actually report it. That only applies to nudity and terrorism content, though, as Facebook still needs actual humans to recognize and report hate speech for whatever reason. Also, while 583 million fake accounts sounds like a big number, that’s only because Facebook doesn’t normally report this stuff. The number of fake accounts pulled in the last quarter of 2017 was “roughly 100 million” more than the 583 million from this past quarter.
Oddly, that last bit kind of undercuts what Facebook is trying to accomplish here, since it implies that the social networking site is not only doing a good job now, but that it has been doing a good job this whole time. Seeing as how we all know that’s not the case, it still seems little hard to trust Facebook.