Despite recent enforcement actions, Facebook is still plagued by fake accounts, including thousands helping promote a far-right German political party.

Facebook announced this week it removed 2.19 billion fake accounts between January and March, its biggest-ever takedown of fakes in a single quarter. Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg confidently told media that “we’re taking down more fake accounts than ever.”

What he didn’t say is that there are also more active fake accounts on Facebook than there were six months ago — more than ever before. Facebook now says 5% of active accounts are fake, up from its previous estimate of 3% to 4%.

The sweep of more than 2 billion fake accounts, while impressive, mostly removed profiles at the point of creation. As Zuckerberg said, “they were never considered active in our systems and we don’t count them in any of our overall community metrics.”

So based on Facebook’s own key metric for measuring fake accounts, the problem is actually getting worse. People who investigate fake accounts on the platform also told BuzzFeed News that the company still fails to remove obvious fakes — even during critical periods, such as the ongoing European Parliament election.

Two days before Facebook released its latest Community Standards Enforcement Report with the number of removed accounts, German broadcaster ZDF published a report about a network of thousands of suspicious Facebook accounts liking pages and content from AfD, the German far-right party. This followed a recent article from German newsweekly Der Spiegel that reported AfD content represents 85% of all German party–affiliated political content being shared on Facebook.

In both cases, the data came from George Washington University research professor Trevor Davis. He spent three months researching AfD’s presence on Facebook and investigating hundreds of thousands of Facebook accounts that have liked AfD pages or posts.

“What I can prove is that in the course of three months I identified 200,000 accounts that have two or more features of artificiality,” he told BuzzFeed News.

He said his findings, and the fact that Facebook has still not taken action after ZDF’s story ran, shows the company is failing at removing active fake accounts.

“Of the nearly 200,000 likely fraudulent accounts we identified, Facebook suspended a grand total of 500 during our study period,” he said in a message. “They failed to suspend accounts using stolen images of famous actors and even the late president of Kosovo as their profile photo. They failed to suspend accounts located in Muslim countries that ‘like’ hundreds of Islamophobic posts a day. This occurred during an election. I find this an odd time for Facebook to publicly pat themselves on the back.”

A Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News it needs to receive more detail from Davis in order to investigate his findings.

“Mr. Davis has not shared his research with us in order for us to substantiate his claims. We would be happy to investigate, as we do frequently when we receive tips from researchers,” they said in an email.

Davis disagrees.

“Though this research has been shared with them via two different German publishers in the past month (Spiegel, ZDF), Facebook has chosen not to reach out to me directly,” he said.