Facebook has announced that between October and December 2020, it took down more than 1.3 billion fake accounts.

The announcement comes as the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce plans to examine how technology platforms including Facebook are tackling misinformation online later this week.

The social media giant said that it had also disabled covert foreign and domestic influence operations that rely on fake accounts.

Over the past three years, the tech company has removed more than 100 networks of coordinated inauthentic behaviour from the platform.

The digital platform said it is also cracking down on “deceptive behaviour,” and that one of the best ways it had fought this was through “disrupting the economic incentives structure behind it.”

Facebook has built teams and systems to detect inauthentic behaviour tactics that are behind a lot of ‘clickbait.’ The company also uses artificial intelligence to help detect fraud and support its policies against fake spam accounts.

Facebook said it now has 35,000 people working on misinformation and that it is making progress because of investment in employees and technologies like AI.

“It is tempting to think about misinformation as a single challenge that can be solved with a single solution,” said Guy Rosen Facebook’s vice president, integrity, in a blog post. “But unfortunately, that’s not the case. Thinking of it that way also misses the opportunity to address it comprehensively.

He added: “Tackling misinformation actually requires addressing several challenges including fake accounts, deceptive behaviour, and misleading and harmful content.”

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