If you’re thinking about trying to buy Facebook ‘likes’ for your business, you might want to think twice. Facebook has been seriously trying to crack down on these ‘like spammers’ for some time, and according to a recent post made by Facebook’s Site Integrity Engineer, Matt Jones, they have actually successfully sued individuals and companies for this type of like spam. The legal action has reportedly brought in nearly $2 billion in judgments.
The post did not specify how many different cases this was composed of, or over how much time, but even if it goes back to the beginning of the Facebook ‘like’ it is still a considerable number. What is perhaps more interesting is the fact that this is, for the most part, the first anyone has heard about these types of cases. This means that Facebook is largely taking these actions quietly, which should frighten many Facebook like spammers.
In the post, Jones said, “We have a strong incentive to aggressively go after the bad actors behind fake likes because businesses and people who use our platform want real connections and results, not fakes. Businesses won’t achieve results and could end up doing less business on Facebook if the people they’re connected to aren’t real. It’s in our best interest to make sure that interactions are authentic.”
He also mentions that legal action is just one of many strategies that the social media site uses to stop like spamming. They also monitor for dramatic increases in the number of likes an account has, as this could be an indication that it was hacked. There are limits to how many likes an account can give, and when accounts use too many, they have to perform some type of verification step to continue.
While the $2 Billion in legal judgments is quite impressive, it seems unlikely that they have actually collected on that full amount. It is more likely that Facebook was primarily attempting to put these spammers out of business, whether they make money on the lawsuit or not.
You can read more about this on Jones’ post HERE.
