Facebook said on Thursday it is taking action against tens of thousands of fake accounts in France as the social network giant seeks to demonstrate it is doing more to halt the spread of spam as well as fake news, hoaxes and misinformation, reports CNBC.
The Silicon Valley-based company is under intense pressure as governments across Europe threaten new laws unless Facebook moves quickly to remove extremist propaganda or other content illegal under existing regulation.
Social media sites including Twitter, Google's YouTube and Facebook also are under scrutiny for their potential to be used to manipulate voters in national elections set to take place in France and Germany in coming months.
In a blog post, Facebook said it was taking action against 30,000 fake accounts in France, deleting them in some, but not all, cases. It said its priority was to remove fake accounts with high volumes of posting activity and the biggest audiences.
"We've made improvements to recognize these inauthentic accounts more easily by identifying patterns of activity without assessing the content itself," Shabnam Shaik, a Facebook security team manager, wrote in an official blog post.
For example, the company said it is using automated detection to identify repeated posting of the same content or an increase in messages sent by such profiles.
Also on Thursday, Facebook took out full-page ads in Germany's best-selling newspapers to educate readers on how to spot fake news.