Facebook cracks down on spammy content by cutting reach and monetization

Facebook will begin lowering the reach of accounts sharing spammy content and making them ineligible for monetization, Meta announced on Thursday. The company is also increasing efforts to remove Facebook accounts that coordinate fake engagement and impersonate others, it says.

The move comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has promised a return to “OG Facebook.” The social network’s plan to crack down on spammy content could be seen as an attempt to return to Facebook’s glory days when users’ feeds were filled with authentic content from real people.

The announcement also comes as AI slop is becoming a serious problem across social media platforms, including Facebook. While Facebook’s announcement post doesn’t mention this issue, it’s likely that the crack down will include AI slop. We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment.

Meta admits that some accounts on its platform try to game the algorithm to increase views or gain unfair monetization advantages, which results in spammy content flooding users’ feeds. To remedy this, it’s cracking down on accounts that exhibit certain types of spammy behavior.

This type of behavior includes accounts that share content with long captions alongside an excessive number of hashtags. It also includes accounts that post content with captions that are unrelated to the content, such as an image of a dog with a caption about airplane facts.

Meta says that while the intention behind these sorts of posts isn’t always malicious, it does lead to spammy content that ends up overshadowing original content from creators.

Facebook will also target spam networks that create hundreds of networks to share the same spammy content, making them ineligible for monetization.

To crack down on fake engagement, Facebook will reduce the reach and visibility of comments that it detects as fake engagement. Plus, Facebook will start testing a comments feature that will allow users to signal which comments are irrelevant or don’t fit in the context of the conversation. 

In addition, Facebook announced that it’s updating its comment management tool to detect and auto-hide comments from people who may be using a fake identity. Creators will also be able to report impersonators in the comments. 

Today’s announcement comes a few weeks after Facebook introduced a revamped “Friends” tab that will only showcase updates from friends, without any other recommended content. Both the new Friends tab and the crackdown on spammy content show that Facebook is trying to improve users’ feeds and show them content that they actually want to see.

It’s not a surprise that Facebook is looking to return to “OG Facebook,” especially since recently uncovered emails from 2022 showed that Zuckerberg was concerned that the social network was losing cultural relevance.