Facebook
said Friday it has stepped up its battle against spammers who promise to
deliver "likes" to its members, and warned users on using such scams.
The
world's most popular social network said that to date, it has obtained
legal judgements of nearly $2 billion against fraudulent activities on
Facebook. It was not clear how much of that was actually collected.
Facebook's
moves appeared to counter concerns that users -- including politicians
and companies selling products -- are buying "likes" to make them appear
more popular. And it is targeting a cottage industry which seeks to
deliver these results to Facebook members, often promising "10,000
likes" or more for a fee.
"We
write rules and use machine learning to catch suspicious behaviour that
sticks out. When we catch fraudulent activity, we work to counter and
prevent it, including blocking accounts and removing fake likes all at
once," Facebook site integrity engineer Matt Jones said in a blog post.
"As
our tools have become more sophisticated, we've contributed some of our
spam-fighting technology to the academic community as well, in hopes of
helping other companies combat similar problems."
Jones
said that Facebook if necessary takes the spammers to court "to remind
would-be offenders that we will fight back to prevent abuse on our
platform. We also limit likes per account to make spammers’ operations
less efficient."
Jones said
the moves are aimed at preserving authenticity on the network of more
than one billion members. Facebook uses various techniques including
algorithms to detect when there is a suspicious spike in "likes."
"It’s
important to remember that fraudulent activity is bad for everyone --
including page owners, advertisers, Facebook and people on our
platform," he said. "We have a
strong incentive to aggressively go after the bad actors behind fake
likes because businesses and people who use our platform want real
connections and results, not fakes."
Source
Yahoo News
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