Facebook announced this week that it has deleted some 10 million accounts that were engaging in spam activities and warned that more will be removed from the social media platform in the coming days.
The company said on July 14 that it took action targeting roughly 500,000 accounts that it said had “engaged in spammy behavior or fake engagement,” including “measures ranging from demoting their comments and reducing the distribution of their content to preventing these accounts from monetizing.”
Signaling that it will take action against other accounts, Facebook indicated that it will target accounts that pretend “to be the creator and other times from different spammy accounts” that post the “same meme or video pop-ups” as others.
New changes to the platform will be rolled out gradually over the forthcoming months, the company said.
“To improve your Feed, we’re introducing stronger measures to reduce unoriginal content on Facebook and ultimately protect and elevate creators sharing original content,” the firm said.
The company suggested that accounts that don’t post original content could, at the very least, face penalties. Facebook profiles and pages that receive the most distribution on the platform primarily post original content that was either filmed or created.
Facebook also advised to avoid featuring “visible third-party watermarks and content that is visibly recycled from other apps or sources,” to use “high-quality captions,” and also recommended not posting “super short videos that offer viewers little value.”
The Menlo Park, California-based company said it has technology that can better detect duplicate posts before reducing the distribution of the content on its platform.
“We’re also exploring ways to provide proper attribution to creators,” Facebook said. “For example, we’re testing adding links on duplicate videos that point viewers to the original piece of content.”
“We welcome creators using AI (artificial intelligence) tools to enhance their storytelling, and channels that use AI in their content remain eligible to monetize,” the YouTube spokesperson said. “All channels must follow our monetization policies, and creators are required to disclose when their realistic content is altered or synthetic.”
Meanwhile, Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced Monday that the company is planning to invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” in AI computing infrastructure, confirming that his company is building several AI computing clusters. The first one is scheduled to go online in 2026, he added.
Also this week, Zuckerberg and Meta’s investors reached a settlement to end an $8 billion trial over damages that they alleged were caused to the company by allowing violations to Facebook users’ privacy, a lawyer for the shareholders told a court in Delaware. The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Sam Closic, confirmed the agreement, according to reporters in the courthouse on Thursday.
Shareholders of Meta sued Zuckerberg, former official Marc Andreessen, and other former company officials, including former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, in hopes of holding them liable for billions of dollars in fines and legal costs the company paid in recent years. The Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion in 2019 after finding that it failed to comply with a 2012 agreement with the regulator to protect users’ data.
