Facebook steps up battle against spam

Facebook said yesterday it had stepped up its battle against spammers who promised to deliver "likes" to its members, and warned users on using such scams, AFP reported.

According to the world's most popular social network, it had obtained legal judgments of nearly $2 billion against fraudulent activities on Facebook.

Facebook's moves appeared to address concerns that users -- including politicians and companies selling products were buying "likes" to boost their popularity in the eyes of users.

Also it was taking on a cottage industry which sought to deliver these results to Facebook members, often promising "10,000 likes" or more for a fee.

"We write rules and use machine learning to catch suspicious behavior that sticks out. When we catch fraudulent activity, we work to counter and prevent it, including blocking accounts and removing fake likes all at once," Facebook site integrity engineer Matt Jones said in a blog post.

"As our tools have become more sophisticated, we've contributed some of our spam-fighting technology to the academic community as well, in hopes of helping other companies combat similar problems."

Jones added that when warranted Facebook took the spammers to court "to remind would-be offenders that we will fight back to prevent abuse on our platform. We also limit likes per account to make spammers' operations less efficient."

The company explained that spam was only  ''worth it'' to spammers if it was profitable, Venture Beat reported. As such, Facebook tried to make it difficult for spammers to make money by regularly tweaking its various automated and manual systems for stopping suspicious activity.

According to the company, these systems spanned various points of interaction on the site, including registration, friending, liking, and messaging.

The legal attack was just another layer of the spam-fighting cake with the money generated, the icing on top.

Facebook was not the first company to succeed in reducing spam, and it was also not the first to fail to eliminate it completely. As spammers increasingly worked to do defeat filters, this was an ongoing battle.