Facebook removes ‘spam network’ in Philippines

MANILA, Philippines — Social media company Facebook has taken down over 100 pages and accounts belonging to a “spam network” discovered to have been making money by taking advantage of Filipino users.

A total of 95 pages and 39 accounts with political and entertainment content were removed from the social media platform yesterday morning “for encouraging people to visit low quality websites that contain little substantive content and are full of disruptive ads.”

Facebook said the accounts that were removed belong to a spam network that is likely a coordinated behavior of an individual or individuals working as a group.

The full list of removed accounts was not released, but included those of apparent supporters of President Duterte and Ilocos Norte Gov. Imee Marcos, including Duterte Media, Duterte sa Pagbabago Bukas, DDS, Duterte Phenomenon and Manang Imee.

Also removed were accounts using names and images of popular celebrities, as well as more generic “news” pages such as News Media Trends and Pilipinas Daily News.

“These pages ranged from political to entertainment content, but all were sharing links to the same advertising click farms off Facebook,” said the company.

“We’re monitoring for a range of abuses on Facebook, including spam behavior, and will remove any account or page that breaks our rules,” it added.

Malacañang was unfazed by Facebook’s decision to purge pro-Duterte pages that violated its policies. 

“Facebook must have its rules and regulations. If they are implementing that, then that’s their own rule,” presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo said at a press briefing yesterday.

“Now, if the concern is, there will be no more avenues, there are so many avenues. We have Twitter, Instagram and many others where the advocates can express themselves in support of this administration,” he added. 

Some 4.8 million users followed at least one of the removed pages, according to Facebook.

“We don’t want this kind of behavior on Facebook and we’re investing heavily in both people and technology to keep bad content off our services,” it said.

“This is some of the most important work being done at Facebook. This takedown is a small step in the right direction, and we will continue working to find and remove more bad content,” it added.

Monetizing politics

The takedown of Philippine pages follows a similar move of Facebook in the United States.

Earlier this month, the company said it had removed 559 pages and 251 accounts for consistently violating rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.

It discovered that the spam networks were using sensational political content to earn money by building an audience and driving traffic to their websites.

“The people behind the activity also post the same click bait posts in dozens of Facebook groups, often hundreds of times in a short period, to drum up traffic for their websites. And they often use their fake accounts to generate fake likes and shares,” said Facebook’s head of cyber security policy Nathaniel Gleicher and product manager Oscar Rodriguez in a joint post about the purge.

“This artificially inflates engagement for their inauthentic pages and the posts they share, misleading people about their popularity and improving their ranking in News Feed,” they added.

The Facebook executives noted a shift in generating traffic to “ad farms” from using natural disasters or celebrity gossip to using sensational political content.

“Like the politically motivated activity we’ve seen, the ‘news’ stories or opinions these accounts and pages share are often indistinguishable from legitimate political debate,” said Gleicher and Rodriguez.

“This is why it’s so important we look at these actors’ behavior – such as whether they’re using fake accounts or repeatedly posting spam – rather than their content when deciding which of these accounts, pages or groups to remove,” they added.

Facebook said it has doubled the number of people working on safety and security on the social media platform, reaching over 20,000 people around the world this year.

“We use reports from our community and technology like machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect bad behavior and take action more quickly,” added the company. – With Alexis Romero