Facebook on Wednesday said it has nixed 5.4 billion fake accounts already this year, in a sign of a persistent battle on social media against manipulation and disinformation. "We have improved our ability to detect and block attempts to create fake, abusive accounts," the internet firm said in its latest transparency report.

"We can estimate that every day, we prevent millions of attempts to create fake accounts using these detection systems." Facebook believes that fake accounts -- where someone pretends to be a person or entity which does not exist -- represented about five per cent of its worldwide month active users during the second and third quarters of this year.