Breaking new Ground in the Fight Against Fake Likes

Originally published on Facebook for Business on April 17, 2015 By Huseyin Kerem Cevahir.

Keeping activity authentic on Facebook is an important part of our ongoing efforts to make sure Facebook is a trustworthy place for people and businesses to connect. Last October we shared some of the ways we work to stop fraudulent activity on Facebook, particularly around fighting fake likes. We’ve made big strides in the past six months, so today we’re providing an update on our progress in this area.
Making a small problem smaller
Fraudulent activity has always been a tiny fraction of overall activity on Facebook—we’ve worked hard so that most people on Facebook don’t encounter this sort of thing at all. Even so, 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.
Below are a couple of the major improvements we’ve made since October in the fight against fake likes:
Pattern recognition
New advances in our pattern recognition technologies helped us halt many of the major exchanges that promote fake like activity on Facebook originating from click farms, fake accounts and malware. When we see suspicious patterns of likes coming from or to a specific account, we throughly investigate the situation in order to determine whether there is fraudulent activity taking place.
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 the last six months, we’ve tripled the number of likes we’ve detected and blocked before they ever reached a Page. Because of this effort, a large number of the vendors that were attempting to sell inauthentic likes to Facebook Page administrators have closed their businesses.
Alerting impacted admins
In addition to removing fake likes directly from Pages, we now send notifications to Page administrators when we block or remove fake likes from their Pages to help them learn how to gather authentic fans. Since introducing this feature in March 2015, we’ve notified 200,000 Pages that we’ve protected their accounts from fake likes.
Protecting yourself from fake likes
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: don’t buy fraudulent likes! They may be tempting, but fraudulent likes are going to do more harm than good for your Page.
Check out this guide to learn more about how fake likes are generated, why they’re harmful to your Page, and how you can gain authentic likes that will help you drive real business goals. You can also visit our new tips for keeping your account secure.
To stay up to date on our ongoing efforts to keep Facebook activity authentic, visit the Facebook Security Page.
Kerem Cevahir is a site integrity engineer at Facebook. This post originally appeared on the Facebook Security Page.