Facebook has taken down more than 10,000 fake pages, groups and accounts in Mexico and across Latin America in a bid to prevent abuse and reduce the spread of false information across its platform, ahead of elections.
Facebook’s head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher put out a blogpost mentioning that these fake pages and groups violated the platform’s community standards.
Gliecher said that Facebook is proactively trying to tackle the presence of ‘bad actors’ on the social media platform and rooting them out. He also told that Facebook took down 837 million pieces of spam, 2.5 million pieces of hate speech and disabled 538 million fake accounts globally in the first quarter of 2018. He said that by using technology like machine learning, artificial intelligence and computer vision ‘bad actors’ could be detected.
He said that the need to take up action was especially critical in the run up to elections, as this is when people are found to be discussing and debating on views and ideologies the most.
He also wrote that Facebook is working with third-party fact-checkers to stop spread of false news and making advertisement more transparent.