Meta has purged tens of thousands of fake Facebook and Instagram accounts as part of a sustained effort to dismantle a sophisticated global spam operation. The crackdown, announced on Friday, targets a single network that has been under investigation for six months.
In a blog post, Shabnam Shaik, a technical program manager at Meta, stated that accounts appearing to originate from Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and several other countries were found to be part of a coordinated operation. These accounts used proxies to disguise their true locations and were created through more sophisticated means to avoid detection.
The campaign aimed to deceptively gain new friend connections by liking and interacting with popular publisher pages before sending spam. However, most accounts remained dormant after liking pages, suggesting they had not yet been mobilised. Meta's systems identified and removed a substantial number of inauthentic likes, with 99% of affected pages seeing a drop of less than 3% in likes.
Nearly 20,000 fake accounts that liked Guardian-branded pages were removed. Meta declined to provide the total number of accounts removed globally. The company has also improved its detection capabilities by identifying patterns of activity, such as repeated posting of the same content, to flag fake accounts without assessing content.
This action follows the suspension of 30,000 French accounts last week, reportedly to combat misinformation ahead of the presidential elections. Meta's ongoing efforts aim to reduce spam, misinformation, and other deceptive content spread by fake accounts.
