Facebook disrupts spam operations

Days after Facebook suspended 30,000 fake accounts in France, the social networking giant has disrupted spam operations it had been combating for six months.

In a post, Facebook's Technical Programme Manager Shabnam Shaik said the spam was made up of inauthentic likes and comments that appeared 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," Shaik added.

With this disruption of inauthentic likes, Facebook said almost 99 per cent of affected Pages having more than 10,000 likes will see a drop of less than 3 per cent.

The fake accounts generating spams used tricks to avoid detection, for example, by redirecting their traffic through "proxies" that disguised their location.

The social networking giant believes that the aim of the spam-campaign was to deceptively gain new friend connections by liking and interacting primarily with popular publisher Pages on its platform, after which point they would send spam.

"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," Shaik noted.

To reduce the spread of misinformation and spam shared by creators of fake accounts, Facebook has disabled over 30,000 such profiles in France.

This move is in line with Facebook's efforts to reduce the distribution of misinformation, spam or false news on Facebook.

--IANS

qd/ruwa/bg