From over a year, Mark Zuckerberg started to aggressively fight with the “dark side” of his social media platform.
This action resulted in many changes to the algorithm for the sake of protecting the users from fake, harmful or deceiving links and pieces of information.
A few days ago, Facebook published a new article on their newsroom addressing the problem of fake adverts that are being spread on the network.
“We are always working to combat the spread of misinformation and the financially-motivated bad actors who create misleading experiences for people. Today we’re sharing additional steps we’ve taken to remove even more of them from Facebook, so that what people see after clicking an ad or post matches their expectations.” as we can read in the article.
What does it really mean for us, users?
How is the fake content created?
In order to publish your Ad on the Facebook platform, it must be verified and accepted first by either human verification or automatic content and link checker. It prevents spammers from boosting up their non-valuable for users content.
But it appears that this method was not sufficient enough, and fake advertisers managed to find a way to bypass Facebook security checks.
Basically, they were implementing the script on advertised web pages, which was determining if it was the Facebook reviewer, bot or a normal user that clicked on the link.
By using that rule it was possible to take the platform staff to the verified and trusted site, while Facebook App users, were redirected to the scammed one.
“Cloaked destination pages, which frequently include diet pills, pornography and muscle building scams, create negative and disruptive experiences for people.”
Image taken from newsroom.facebook.com
You may think that the scale of the problem wasn’t that big, but in the article, Rob Leathern, a Product Management Director, is pointing out that “In the past few months these new steps have resulted in us taking down thousands of these offenders and disrupting their economic incentives for misleading people.” It’s clear to see the millions of potentially affected users behind those thousands.
How will these affect me?
“We see cloaking as deliberate and deceptive, and will not tolerate it on Facebook. We will remove Pages that engage in cloaking.” as we can read.
But according to the article “pages should not see changes to their referral traffic.”
So don’t worry about your reach, no matter if you just post casually or use post scheduling software, there is nothing that you can fear off.
Just remember to post valuable stuff, use visual imagery since it boosts your post reach, and respect the proper timing!
