In the first half of 2019, LinkedIn banned or blocked over 21.6 million fake accounts, 19.5 of which never made it past the registration stage, new figures released by the professional networking platform show.

Of the accounts that did go live, around 2 million were detected by employees and the remaining 67,000 were flagged by users. LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft and has around 645 million users, is increasingly targeted by state-sponsored actors as part of disinformation campaigns.

Read more: LinkedIn stopped more than 21 million fake accounts this year, but legitimate users are the real challenge