How many fake accounts does Facebook remove each quarter?

How to get close to this number

The number has to be absurd, and reasoning about incentives tells you why. Creating an account is free and automatable, and fake accounts have commercial value for scams, engagement farming and advertising fraud. When the cost of an attempt is near zero and the payoff is positive, the volume of attempts is limited only by the attacker's compute.

The comparison in the explanation is the one that lands: more accounts removed per quarter than most platforms have users in total. That is not a statement about how many fake people exist; it is a statement about the rate at which automated systems create and automated systems destroy. Both sides of that exchange are machines.

The detail that makes the figure make sense is that most are caught within minutes of creation. These are not accounts that lived among real users and were later discovered — they are bulk registration attempts blocked almost immediately. A removal statistic measures the defence, not the infiltration, and reading it as the latter badly misrepresents it.