Facebook has
announced a relatively small but significant purge of bad actors from the
platform: 810 pages and accounts that have “consistently broken our rules
against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
It may not seem like a lot,
but it sounds like the company is erring on the side of disclosure even if the
news isn’t particularly hard-hitting.
These were
not, as far as Facebook could tell, part of an organized nation-state effort or
political interference campaign, like the Iranian and Russian groups previously
highlighted in these ban alert posts. These are pages that use networks of fake
accounts and pages to drive traffic to clickbait articles strictly for the
purpose of ad revenue.
810 can’t be
much more than a drop out of the bucket of fake accounts on Facebook — of which
there are millions — but the company’s focus right now isn’t individual bad
actors but coordinated ones.
A few
hundred accounts working together to do a bit of ad fraud produces a sort of digital
footprint that might look similar to a a few hundred accounts working together
to push a political narrative or sow discontent. And one can turn into the other quite easily.
There are
patterns of logins, likes, visits, account creation, and so on that Facebook
has been working hard to identify — recently, at least. Although they’ve
designed their net to catch the nation-state actors and large-scale operations
that have previously been uncovered, small fry like these spammers are getting
tangled up as well. Not a bad thing.
“Given the
activity we’ve seen — and its timing ahead of the US midterm elections — we
wanted to give some details about the types of behavior that led to this
action,” the company wrote on its blog.
No doubt
they also want to give the impression that there is indeed a cop on the beat.
Expect more announcements like this through the midterms as Facebook strives to
make it clear that it is working round the clock to keep you, its valuable
product users, safe.
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