Facebook AI Tool Detects 6.5 Billion Fake Accounts

The Verge reports:

Facebook is opening up about the behind-the-scenes tools it uses to combat fake account creation on its platforms, and the company says it has a new artificial intelligence-powered method known as Deep Entity Classification (DEC) that’s proved especially effective.

DEC is a machine learning model that doesn’t just take into account the activity of the suspect account, but it also evaluates all of the surrounding information, including the behaviors of the accounts and pages the suspect account interacts with. Facebook says it’s reduced the estimated volume of spam and scam accounts by 27 percent.

So far, DEC has helped Facebook thwart more than 6.5 billion fake accounts that scammers and other malicious actors created or tried to create last year. A vast majority of those accounts are actually caught in the account creation process.