A number of Facebook users in Egypt circulated posts related to the decrease in the number of followers they have, especially for those who are more than 14 thousand followers, which decreased to 9 thousand followers, according to some publications. For its part, Facebook has not commented on the matter so far.
This is not new, as a number of the largest US media outlets recorded a sudden drop in the numbers of their followers on Facebook on Monday and Tuesday, fueling speculation that the social media giant may have removed the accounts of the bots.
Follower numbers for the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, The Hill, USA Today, New York Post and Newsweek all fell Oct. 3 and 4, according to data from analytics platform CrowdTangle.
USA Today suffered the biggest drop, losing 13,723 followers on Monday and 11,392 followers on Tuesday, while The New York Times lost 6,225 followers on Monday and 4,944 followers on Tuesday.
The number of followers on the Washington Post’s page fell by 5,804 on Monday, then another 4,337 on Tuesday, and in total, the seven posts lost 38,812 likes on Monday and 29,692 on Tuesday.
Between April and June 2022, Facebook took action against 1.4 billion suspected bot accounts, according to the Community Standards Enforcement report, and in the previous three months, 1.6 billion “fake accounts” had been terminated.
As Facebook says on the Transparency Center pages: Our goal is to remove as many fake accounts on Facebook as possible, and these include accounts created with malicious intent to violate our policies and profiles created to represent a non-human company, organization or 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 incentivize them financially.
“We expect the number of accounts we intervene in to change over time. Due to the unpredictable nature of debit account creation, our detection technology helps us prevent millions of attempts to create fake accounts per day and discover millions more, often within minutes after creation. We do not include attempts prohibited in the metrics we report here.”
From April to June of this year, Facebook estimated that “fake accounts represented about 5 percent of our monthly active users worldwide.”
