Facebook deletes millions of accounts in major purge on ‘spammy behaviour' and 'unoriginal content'
Facebook is cracking down on ‘spammy’ and ‘unoriginal’ content ❌
- Facebook is purging millions of accounts, it has announced.
- Social media giant is cracking down on ‘copycats and impersonators’
- But which accounts are at risk of being deleted?
A purge of ‘copycat’ accounts is on-going at Facebook and millions have already been deleted. The social media giant has also been cracking down on ‘spam’ content.
In the first half of the year it took action on around 500,000 accounts engaged in “spammy behavior or fake engagement”, Meta has announced. They have also deleted around 10 million profiles “impersonating large content producers”.
A post on Facebook’s creator blog explained: “Too often the same meme or video pops up repeatedly ‑ sometimes from accounts pretending to be the creator and other times from different spammy accounts. It dulls the experience for all and makes it harder for fresh voices to break through.
“To improve your Feed, we’re introducing stronger measures to reduce unoriginal content on Facebook and ultimately protect and elevate creators sharing original content.”
Millions of Facebook accounts deleted
In a bid to improve services for users, the social media giant says that it has deleted 10 million accounts said to be impersonators. These accounts are described as having been impersonating large accounts on the platform.
Facebook cracking down on accounts sharing unoriginal content
Posting on its Facebook creator blog, the company explained that it considers unoriginal content as anything that “reuses or repurposes another creator's content repeatedly” without crediting.
“We love it when creators reshare content, add commentary in a reaction video or join in on a trend, adding their unique take,” it added.
“What we want to combat is the repeated reposting of content from other creators without permission or meaningful enhancements.”
Facebook continued: “We're now introducing stronger measures to combat this behaviour on Facebook. Accounts that improperly reuse someone else’s videos, photos or text posts repeatedly will not only lose access to Facebook monetization programs for a period of time, but will also receive reduced distribution on everything they share.
“In addition, if our systems detect duplicate videos on Facebook, we will reduce the distribution of the copies so that original creators can get the visibility that they deserve. We’re also exploring ways to provide proper attribution to creators. For example, we're testing adding links on duplicate videos that point viewers to the original piece of content.”
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