Meta has announced a major crackdown on spam on Facebook. The company is starting to severely penalize accounts that try to manipulate the algorithm by publishing long posts and adding numerous hashtags.
The platform has been cracking down on accounts that post captions that are unrelated to the images. Now, if Meta detects an account with such posts, the company will restrict its content to followers only and stop paying for posts.
In the example provided by Meta, the company shows a spam post that contains a photo of a dog along with a caption that is completely unrelated to the image, namely: “Top 10 #FACTS ABOUT PLANES.” Another example is a long post about the benefits of cars with several hashtags, such as “#VIRALCONTENT,” “#LIKEFORLIKE,” and “#BOOST,” located at the bottom.
Meta will also disable monetization for owners of "hundreds of accounts sharing the same content." Most of these accounts are created with the aim of increasing followers, views, and "unfair monetization," the company added.
Meta also plans to reduce the visibility of comments that the system identifies as part of coordinated fake activity, and the company is also testing a new feature that will allow users to report such comments themselves.
In addition, users will receive their own moderation tools that will allow them to hide comments from users who may be masquerading as other people.
Meta will combat such content, saying that "spam can prevent people from expressing their opinions, regardless of their views, so we focus on behavior that manipulates the distribution and monetization of content."
As a reminder, Facebook recently launched a friends-only feed, which excludes algorithmic recommendations.