On Monday and Tuesday, the sudden drops in Facebook follower counts of several of the USA’s largest media outlets led to rumours that the social media giant might be deleting fake or bot accounts.
According to data from analytics platform CrowdTangle, the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, The Hill, USA Today, New York Post, and Newsweek all lost followers on October 3 and 4. Even Mark Zuckerberg’s number fell from over 100 million to just 9,993 overnight, according to reports.
Many believe a bug is to blame for the sudden drop in their (and others’) follower counts. On the profile summary page, the number of followers has been significantly slashed for many users. However, if one click’s on the followers’ link, the previous larger number is displayed.
The New York Post lost 8,200 followers on Monday, then another 4,378 on Tuesday. The Washington Post’s page lost an estimated 5,804 followers on Monday, then an additional 4,337 on Tuesday.
On Monday and Tuesday, 38,812 and 29,692 Facebook likes were lost, respectively, in total, of the seven publications listed below.
In its Community Standards Enforcement Report, Facebook said it took action against 1.4 billion suspected bots between April and June 2022. During the preceding three months, 1.6 billion “fake accounts” were terminated.
In the period April to June 2017, Facebook estimated that 5% of its entire global monthly users were fake accounts.
Facebook says on its Transparency Center pages: “Our goal is to remove as many fake accounts on Facebook as we can. These include accounts created with malicious intent to violate our policies and personal profiles created to represent a business, organization or non-human entity, such as a pet.
“We prioritize enforcement against fake accounts that seek to cause harm. Many of these accounts are used in spam campaigns and are financially motivated.”
“We expect the number of accounts we action to vary over time due to the unpredictable nature of adversarial account creation. Our detection technology helps us block millions of attempts to create fake accounts every day and detect millions more, often within minutes after creation. We do not include blocked attempts in the metrics we report here.”
