Facebook knocks down massive spammer network
Facebook knocks down massive spammer network
Facebook is cracking down on fake accounts.
The social network says it had been "combating"
the operation for six months.
by Richard Nieva April 14, 2017 10:46 AM PDT
Facebook famously boasts it has 1.86 billion users who
visit the social network every month. It looks like that number shrank on
Friday.
The company, which previously announced its cracking down
on fake accounts, said it's disrupted a major spam operation being run out of
Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and other countries.
"The apparent intent of the campaign was to
deceptively gain new friend connections by liking and interacting primarily
with popular publisher Pages on our platform, after which point they would send
spam," Shabnam Shaik, a Facebook technical program manager wrote in a blog
post.
"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," Shaik wrote. "By disrupting the campaign
now, we expect that we will prevent this network of spammers from reaching its
end goal of sending inauthentic material to large numbers of people."
The number of authentic users matters for Facebook
because the company charges marketers and advertisers to reach the most
eyeballs. Facebook didn't reveal the number of accounts affected by this
crackdown.
Fake profiles, or bots, are an ongoing problem for social
networks, and making software that generates the fake fans has become a
big-money industry. In 2014, Facebook estimated 67.7 million to 137.8 million
accounts were either duplicates or fake.
Twitter has had the same problem. About 15 percent of
Twitter's 319 million active monthly users are reportedly bots, according to
research from the University of Southern California and Indiana University.
Comments
Post a Comment