People come to Facebook to connect with the people and businesses they care about, so we maintain a global team that focuses on building systems to keep unwanted, inauthentic stuff off of our platform. Since National Cyber Security Awareness Month just kicked off on Wednesday, we thought this would be a good time to discuss our work and explain how we fight to keep Facebook full of the real interactions people want.
Keeping it real
Most people rarely come into contact with spam or other low quality content on Facebook, but we're constantly working to make our service even better. It's important to remember that fraudulent activity is bad for everyone—including Page owners, advertisers, Facebook, and people on our platform. We adapt our defenses constantly to stay ahead of spammers' techniques, and one area we've focused on for several years is fake likes. We have a strong incentive to aggressively get rid of fake likes because businesses and people who use our platform want real connections and results, not fakes. Businesses won't achieve results and could end up doing less business on Facebook if the people they're connected to aren't real. It's in our best interest to make sure that interactions are authentic.
Why fakers fake
The spammers behind fake likes have one goal — to make money off of Page owners without delivering any value in return. They make their profit by promising and generating likes to Facebook Page administrators who typically don't understand that fake likes won't help them achieve their business goals.
Fake like peddlers tempt Page admins with offers to “buy 10,000 likes!” or other similar schemes. To deliver those likes, the scammers often try to create fake accounts, or in some cases, even hack into real accounts in order to use them for sending spam and acquiring more likes. Since these fraudulent operations are financially motivated businesses, we focus our energy on making this abuse less profitable for the spammers.
Gaining the upper hand
Fake likes are only profitable when they can spread at scale. To make it harder for these scams to be profitable, our abuse-fighting team builds and constantly updates a combination of automated and manual systems that help us catch suspicious activity at various points of interaction on the site, including registration, friending, liking, and messaging.
We write rules and use machine learning to catch suspicious behavior 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. 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. We want to help block spam no matter where it spreads.
Beyond technical measures, we pursue other methods to make spamming less profitable. We have obtained nearly $2 billion in legal judgments against spammers, and we utilize these channels when possible 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. When like activity gets unusually high, we take additional steps to make sure the likes are legitimate, such as asking for additional verification. These measures often help slow down or deter the activity completely. Ultimately, it's a combination of approaches rather than a single technique that helps us stay ahead of the spammers.
Tips for authentic interactions
You can count on us to keep dedicating our time and energy to fighting inauthentic content, but there are also ways that you can help protect yourself from getting caught up in fraudulent activity.
Don’t buy fraudulent likes
Fraudulent likes are going to do more harm than good to your Page. The people involved are unlikely to engage with a Page after liking it initially. Our algorithm takes Page engagement rates into account when deciding when and where to deliver a Page's legitimate ads and content, so Pages with an artificially inflated number of likes are actually making it harder on themselves to reach the people they care about most.
Keeping it real
Most people rarely come into contact with spam or other low quality content on Facebook, but we're constantly working to make our service even better. It's important to remember that fraudulent activity is bad for everyone—including Page owners, advertisers, Facebook, and people on our platform. We adapt our defenses constantly to stay ahead of spammers' techniques, and one area we've focused on for several years is fake likes. We have a strong incentive to aggressively get rid of fake likes because businesses and people who use our platform want real connections and results, not fakes. Businesses won't achieve results and could end up doing less business on Facebook if the people they're connected to aren't real. It's in our best interest to make sure that interactions are authentic.
Why fakers fake
The spammers behind fake likes have one goal — to make money off of Page owners without delivering any value in return. They make their profit by promising and generating likes to Facebook Page administrators who typically don't understand that fake likes won't help them achieve their business goals.
Fake like peddlers tempt Page admins with offers to “buy 10,000 likes!” or other similar schemes. To deliver those likes, the scammers often try to create fake accounts, or in some cases, even hack into real accounts in order to use them for sending spam and acquiring more likes. Since these fraudulent operations are financially motivated businesses, we focus our energy on making this abuse less profitable for the spammers.
Gaining the upper hand
Fake likes are only profitable when they can spread at scale. To make it harder for these scams to be profitable, our abuse-fighting team builds and constantly updates a combination of automated and manual systems that help us catch suspicious activity at various points of interaction on the site, including registration, friending, liking, and messaging.
We write rules and use machine learning to catch suspicious behavior 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. 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. We want to help block spam no matter where it spreads.
Beyond technical measures, we pursue other methods to make spamming less profitable. We have obtained nearly $2 billion in legal judgments against spammers, and we utilize these channels when possible 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. When like activity gets unusually high, we take additional steps to make sure the likes are legitimate, such as asking for additional verification. These measures often help slow down or deter the activity completely. Ultimately, it's a combination of approaches rather than a single technique that helps us stay ahead of the spammers.
Tips for authentic interactions
You can count on us to keep dedicating our time and energy to fighting inauthentic content, but there are also ways that you can help protect yourself from getting caught up in fraudulent activity.
Don’t buy fraudulent likes
Fraudulent likes are going to do more harm than good to your Page. The people involved are unlikely to engage with a Page after liking it initially. Our algorithm takes Page engagement rates into account when deciding when and where to deliver a Page's legitimate ads and content, so Pages with an artificially inflated number of likes are actually making it harder on themselves to reach the people they care about most.
Focus on key business objectives
Page likes can make your ads more effective and efficient, and they can provide you with insights into people connected to your business. However, obtaining likes shouldn't be a goal unto itself. Your business will see much greater value if you use Facebook to achieve specific business objectives, like driving in-store sales or boosting app downloads.
If getting more likes will help you drive your business objectives, we offer tools to help Pages generate authentic likes from real people who are genuinely interested in a Page. You can visit the “Build Audience” tab on any Page you administer in order to invite friends to like the Page or pay to promote your Page using targeting criteria that you specify. Targeting is the key to obtaining the specific results you want from your campaign.
If getting more likes will help you drive your business objectives, we offer tools to help Pages generate authentic likes from real people who are genuinely interested in a Page. You can visit the “Build Audience” tab on any Page you administer in order to invite friends to like the Page or pay to promote your Page using targeting criteria that you specify. Targeting is the key to obtaining the specific results you want from your campaign.
Be cautious to avoid infecting your computer with malware
Malware is software that's designed to take unwanted actions on your behalf, such as liking Pages. You can get malware from things like:
- Clicking suspicious links, including ones that try to get you to watch a "shocking video" or view “unbelievable photos of you”
- Visiting a website that claims to offer special features on Facebook
- Downloading a browser add-on that claims to do something to alter your Facebook experience. There are sites and add-ons that claim they can show you who's viewing your profile, change the color of your profile or help you remove your Timeline. These features don't exist.
If you think you have malware on your computer, learn how to get rid of it.
Posted by: Matt Jones, Site Integrity Engineer
