France: Facebook suspends 30,000 fake accounts

To reduce the spread of misinformation and spam shared by creators of fake accounts, Facebook has disabled over 30,000 such profiles in France.

Facebook on Thursday in a statement said that they aimed to remove the fake accounts with the largest footprint, with a high amount of activity and a broad reach.

This move is in line with Facebook's efforts to reduce the distribution of misinformation, spam or false news on Facebook.

"We've found that a lot of false news is financially motivated, and as part of our work to promote an informed society, we have focused on making it very difficult for dishonest people to exploit our platform from false news sites using Facebook," said Shabnam Shaik, Technical Programme Manager, Facebook.

To weed out the fake accounts, Facebook said it identifies patterns of activity -- without assessing the content itself.

"For example, our systems may detect repeated posting of the same content, or an increase in messages sent," Facebook added.