14 DAY TRIAL // 559 pages and 251 accounts were removed today by Facebook in a move meant to enforce the social network's coordinated inauthentic behavior and spam rules.
"Many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a network of Groups and Pages to drive traffic to their websites," the press release said. "Many used the same techniques to make their content appear more popular on Facebook than it really was."
Although according to Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy and Oscar Rodriguez, Product Manager pages coordinating with each other can be motivated by quite some legitimate reasons, it was straightforward to distinguish the mischievous goals of the accounts and pages that got removed.
Besides driving traffic to their own websites by using fake accounts and faking popularity on the platform, the removed pages and accounts were also behaving as ad farms disguising themselves as legitimate political debate forums.
"As we get better at uncovering this kind of abuse, the people behind it — whether economically or politically motivated — will change their tactics to evade detection," also said Gleicher. "It’s why we continue to invest heavily, including in better technology, to prevent this kind of misuse."
The 559 pages and 251 accounts removed from Facebook's platform for violating its antispam policy
According to Gleicher, the rule-breaking entities that were removed from the platform organized their pages and accounts as a network designed to spam Facebook Groups with clickbait posts which would boost traffic to websites that they controlled.
Additionally, the spammers were also creating and using fake accounts designed for fake liking and sharing their Facebook posts for artificially increasing engagements, effectively improving News Feed rankings.
This added to all other unusual behavior noticed by Facebook related to the network of 559 pages and 251 accounts which were removed for violating the social network's antispam policy.
Facebook reaction to these spam accounts and pages is more than justified "Because people will only share on Facebook if they feel safe and trust the connections they make here," as Gleicher said.