Facebook has been plagued with a series of spam, including false likes, comments and posts. The company has set out to correct the same and it appears as if the company’s efforts are finally yielding fruit. Facebook has today announced that it has managed to put an end to what it calls a sophisticated and coordinated operation that has been responsible for spamming the website for as long as six months.
Announcing the news, the company said:
Today we are taking another step to disrupt a spam operation that we have been combating for six months. It is made up of inauthentic likes and comments that appear to come from accounts located in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and a number of other countries. We found that most of this activity was generated not through traditional mass account creation methods, but by more sophisticated means that try to mask the fact that the accounts are part of the same coordinated operation.
Apparently, the selfsame group has been using a series of tricks to avoid detection. This included redirecting their traffic through a series of proxies that disguised their locations as well.
So here was what happened: The campaign was aimed towards gaining new friends by liking and interacting with popular publisher Pages on Facebook. These connections would then send spam to their connections. Facebook also said that the vast bulk of these accounts shut down after liking a number of Pages. The conclusion the company drew from this was, that these accounts were launched strictly to make connections and send spam to others.
Once Facebook caught on to the game, its systems identified the illegitimate activity that was taking place on the platform. The company than started actually removing likes. The company also managed to obtain help from its partners, by getting them to alert it any suspicious activity they recognized.
As we remove the rest of the inauthentic likes, we expect that 99% of impacted Pages with more than 10,000 likes will see a drop of less than 3%. None of these likes were the result of paid ads from the affected Pages.
With Facebook’s promotions and paid reach, the company has created a revenue source. As such, inauthentic likes and comments and spam is a strict no-no. As such, ensuring that the system stays as authentic as possible is in everyone’s best interests. The company has already had trouble with fake news, showing expanded numbers to advertisers and so on. As such, it doesn’t want to stir up fresh troubles by letting fake likes run amok on the platform. And if you think likes are unimportant, just check out how much Facebook charges for getting likes to your page.
