Facebook announced a number of new measures against combating fake accounts and related spam they promote on the company’s social media platform. In a release published on Thursday, the Menlo Park-based Internet giant stressed the importance of “meaningful” online interactions, noting that all kinds of fake accounts — whether controlled by bots or humans — deteriorate the overall user experience of all social media. With that in mind, the firm is currently in the process of introducing a number of new changes meant to eliminate fake Facebook accounts and all of the content they’re spreading. The company’s engineers managed to profile numerous verified Facebook spammers and accounts that spread fake news, then used that information to define activity patterns of such accounts that don’t rely on the actual contents of information they are sharing. Instead, Facebook’s new algorithms are now looking into things like the frequency of reposting articles and personal messaging rate in an effort to single out potentially suspicious accounts that may be using its social media platform with the goal of artificially and forcefully pushing a certain agenda, the company revealed.
The new anti-fake accounts measures introduced by Facebook are expected to significantly reduce the dissemination of material that was so far mostly promoted thanks to what the company refers to as “inauthentic activity.” This content includes both spam and inaccurate articles, but also misleading stories that fake accounts are spreading for various reasons, though most often with the goal of redirecting traffic to certain websites and consequently earning advertising revenue through such activity. The Menlo Park-based social media giant has reportedly been testing the new measures for a while now and has actually already used them to eliminate more than 30,000 fake accounts in France, the company revealed on Thursday.
Facebook also noted that not every inauthentic account will be removed from the social network, as all sanctions will depend on the context and frequency of violations. Furthermore, while the newly introduced measures against fake Facebook accounts are now rolling out globally, the actual methodology behind them will still evolve over time as the company continues to experiment with its tools and assessing their effectiveness.