Facebook is going on a crusade against fake accounts, and has been doing a lot to purge its platform from them, and spam in general. It even shut down a massive spam operation recently, after announcing that it had made changes to find and delete fake accounts more effectively.
The changes, announced in a Facebook Security note by Shabnam Shaik, a technical program manager on Facebook’s protect and care team include “improvements to recognize these inauthentic accounts more easily by identifying patterns of activity—without assessing the content itself.” Facebook‘s systems can now detect when the same content is posted over and over again, or if there is a sudden increases in messages sent.
Facebook recently used the improvements to weed out fake accounts by disrupting a spam operation it had been monitoring for months. It also announced that it was able to “take action against more than 30,000 fake accounts” in France recently. In an effort to distance itself from criticism about the spread of fake news – like it did after the U.S. elections, Facebook also ran full page ads in several French newspapers to help people notice fake news. It also started educating users about fake news with messages at the top of users’ News Feeds.
Of course, these are only improvements, and will not lead to the removal of all fake accounts. Shaik did explain though, that such measures are expected to
[quote]reduce the spread of material generated through inauthentic activity, including spam, misinformation or other deceptive content that is often shared by creators of fake accounts.[/quote]
They also help Facebook improve its effectiveness in battling fake news, fake accounts, and spam on its platform.
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