Facebook does its best to make sure spam isn't littering the social network and annoying its many users

Oct 4, 2014 14:08 GMT  ·  By

Everybody knows that Facebook isn’t exactly filled with 100% real people and that some of the things we see on the network aren’t exactly real either. Facebook knows it too and has been working a lot to make sure spammers stay away, including taking them to court and obtaining nearly $2 billion (€1.6 billion) from them.

“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 our platform,” said Facebook’s site integrity engineer, Matt Jones.

While the company explains that most people rarely actually come into contact with spam on the network, they’re always working to make things better and working to adapt the network’s defenses to stay ahead of spammers’ techniques. One area that Facebook has focused on is the fake likes, since they’re not bringing anyone any real benefit.

“Businesses won’t achieve results and could end up doing less business on Facebook if the people they’re connected to aren’t real,” Jones explains.

He goes on, saying that spammers try to make money off of Page owners without delivering any real value. The company has been particularly looking into those who offer to sell “10,000 likes” or other similar schemes to Page owners that want to get noticed faster, even if this doesn’t bring any real value.

Spamming can be expensive

Facebook uses rules and machine learning to catch suspicious behavior that sticks out and when it manages to catch fraudulent activity, the company acts by blocking accounts and removing fake likes at the same time.

“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,” Facebook’s Jones urged.

If you didn’t know until now, Facebook reveals that each account has a limited number of likes it can give on a certain time period. When activity gets unusually high, steps are taken to make sure the likes are legitimate. On such occasions, additional verification may be required, which will slow down or deter the activity completely.

While Facebook does quite a bit to fight against spamming, the company also advises users to help out by doing a simple thing – stop buying fraudulent likes. After all, if there’s no demand, there will be no supply.