Facebook on Friday announced its fight against ‘fake’ likes has paid off well as it has successfully detected and eliminated them in big numbers.
The social networking giant said its “new recognition technologies” allowed it to triple the number of detected and blocked fake ‘likes’ over the last six months. Fake likes are usually generated using malicious software, fraudulent accounts, or groups of lowly paid workers on click farms and are sold to page owners who want to boost their exposure on Facebook.
H. Kerem Cevahir, Facebook site security engineer said, “We continue to adapt and improve the methods we use to prevent fake likes because scammers are constantly evolving and testing new methods to try to get around our spam prevention systems.”
“This work has made it extremely difficult for the people selling fraudulent likes to actually deliver their promised likes to paying customers.”
“In fact, over the past six months, we’ve tripled the number of likes we’ve detected and blocked before they ever reached a Page.”
Cevahir added that Facebook is now sending notifications to administrators of Pages when it blocks or removes fraudulent likes from those Pages in order to “help them learn how to gather authentic fans.”
Since March 2015, Facebook has notified 200,000 page owners, Cevahir said. However he did not mention exactly how many fake likes were removed.
