Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised he's "dead serious" regarding crashing down on evil activity on the monstrous social network after the Russia campaign to sow political discord and manipulate the 2016 presidential campaign.
He also warned investors that efforts to secure Facebook will significantly cut into profits.
"We're bringing the same intensity to these security issues that we've brought to any adversary or challenge we've faced," Zuckerberg said. "I'm dead serious about this, and the reason I'm talking about this on our earnings call is that I've directed our teams to invest so much in security — proceeding the leader of that additional advances we're making — that it will significantly impact our profitability going forward, and I wanted our investors to hear that directly from me."
Zuckerberg made the remarks as Facebook reported its best quarter yet. Extending its profits baking streak, Facebook decapitated Wall Street ratings with third-quarter earnings per share of $1.59 on revenue of $10.3 billion. It was expected to report earnings per share of $1.28 on revenue of $9.8 billion.
Facebook's chief economic manager David Wehner warned that 2018 is growing up to be a "significant investment year" with operating expenses rising 45% to 50% as the Menlo Park, Calif., company increases security spending, as well as spending on the company's push to add more video and to grow its augmented and virtual reality business. Subsequent Wehner's example, pieces dropped more than 1% in after-hours dealing.
Wednesday's results came right after Facebook wrapped up its third congressional hearing on Capitol Hill where its top lawyer, Colin Stretch, answered questions about the Kremlin-linked Russian influence campaign.
Facebook has 10,000 people working on safety and security issues and plans to add 10,000 more. Negative every one of the people decrees is employees but Facebook did not say how many contractors it would hire.
"We are going to invest in both people and technology," Zuckerberg said.
Facebook on Wednesday also significantly raised estimates of how many duplicate accounts and fake accounts.
Duplicate accounts — an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her main account — accounts for 10% of Facebook's nearly 2.1 billion monthly active users, up from 6%. Fake accounts also account that is run by bots, not individuals, realize 2%-3% of accounts, up from 1%, Facebook said.That means more than 200 million accounts are duplicates and as many as 60 million are fake.
Facebook said it raised the estimates based on a new methodology for measuring duplicate accounts and on improvements "to the data signals we rely on."
That revelation suggests extra questions for Facebook about how secure its data
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