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Fake news is and remains a major problem. Tackling this is not always easy and often requires substantial investments. This also applies to various tech companies such as Facebook. It turns out that two million WhatsApp accounts are deleted every month, in violation of fake news.

WhatsApp reports this to the British newspaper The Guardian when asked to do so. The Facebook service tries to prevent the spread of fake news and false information by removing all those fake accounts. WhatsApp is a must, because in many countries it remains a major problem that fake news is distributed quickly and easily.

A complex market

An example of The Guardian is the fact that WhatsApp is regularly used in India to spread fake news. India is an extremely complex market for the company, where it has more than two hundred million users. But the app is used for purposes it wasn’t meant for.

For example, there may be as many as 30 cases of people being lynched by a mass of people after rumours were spread through the app about possible abuse by the victims. The Indian government had already strongly criticised this and Facebook decided to restrict certain functions of WhatsApp. In India, for example, it is less easy to forward messages.

Combating fake news

Just yesterday, Facebook announced to The Guardian that it is encouraging users to report accounts that send messages on a massive scale. A machine learning algorithm has also been developed to detect these accounts. We’re not here to give people a megaphone. We are in favour of sending private messages, let developer Matt Jones, who is responsible for the fight against spam within WhatsApp, know to the newspaper.

Around 95 percent of the two million accounts that were deleted, showed abnormal WhatsApp behavior, says the company. For example, these accounts seldom have a typing status, while they do send messages on a regular basis. Suspicious accounts also send a lot of messages shortly after they are registered.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.