Meta
has announced new measures against spam and “cheating” on Facebook. From now on, accounts that abuse long posts, meaningless hashtags and attempts to deceive the algorithm will have their audience reach limited, and their authors will be deprived of monetization.
Image source: Shutter Speed / Unsplash
The restrictions will also apply to accounts that create posts with captions that are completely unrelated to the image. If accounts with this type of post are detected by the platform, their content will only be available to subscribers. As an example, Meta cited a photo of a dog with the caption “Top 10 facts about #AIRPLANES”. Such content, as The Verge writes, is considered by algorithms as manipulation and will be automatically hidden from the general audience.
Image source: Meta
«Spam prevents users from being heard, regardless of their point of view. Therefore, we will monitor behavior that artificially increases reach and monetization,” Meta said. It is specified that these changes appeared just a few weeks after the launch of the Friends-only feed, where algorithmic recommendations are absent.
The company will also begin limiting the reach of users who create “hundreds of accounts to distribute the same content.” These accounts will no longer be able to make money from their posts, as most of them inflate their followers and views to gain an unfair advantage in monetization, according to Meta.
In addition, the visibility of comments with signs of coordinated manipulation will be reduced. To this end, the social network is testing a function that will allow users to mark useless messages, and page owners will receive a tool to automatically hide comments from fake profiles.
Let us recall that Facebook has previously introduced similar restrictions for groups and pages sending mass spam. Now this also applies to individual users using various cheating techniques.