FILE PHOTO: Attendees walk past a Facebook logo during Facebook Inc’s F8 developers’ conference in San Jose, California, U.S., on April 30, 2019. REUTERS/Stephen Lam/File Photo
Facebook is taking a more aggressive approach to shut down coordinated groups of real-user accounts engaging in certain harmful activities on its platform, using the same strategy its security teams take against campaigns using fake accounts, the company told Reuters.
The new approach, reported here for the first time, uses the tactics usually taken by Facebook‘s security teams for wholesale shutdowns of networks engaged in influence operations that use false accounts to manipulate public debate, such as Russian troll farms.
It could have major implications for how the social media giant handles political and other coordinated movements breaking its rules, at a time when Facebook‘s approach to abuses on its platforms is under heavy scrutiny from global lawmakers and civil society groups.
Facebook said it now plans to take this same network-level approach with groups of coordinated real accounts that systemically break its rules, through mass reporting, where many users falsely report a target’s content or account to get it shut down, or brigading, a type of online harassment where users might coordinate to target an individual through mass posts or comments.
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In a related change, Facebook said on Thursday that would be taking the same type of approach to campaigns of real users that cause “coordinated social harm” on and off its platforms, as it announced a takedown of the German anti-COVID restrictions Querdenken movement.
These expansions, which a spokeswoman said were in their early stages, means Facebook‘s security teams could identify core movements driving such behavior and take more sweeping actions than the company removing posts or individual accounts as it otherwise might.
