Facebook to crack down on brands' fake 'like' practices

Facebook said it had "increased" its "automated efforts" to remove 'Likes' from company pages on the site where those 'Likes' had been gained through a breach of its terms and conditions. It said the crackdown would benefit both its users and the brands themselves.

Many companies operate pages on Facebook in order to raise their public profile and encourage users to 'like' their brand in order to be able to update those users with information about their products and services, such as discount offers and promotions.

"These newly improved automated efforts will remove those Likes gained by malware, compromised accounts, deceived users, or purchased bulk Likes," Facebook said on its security blog. "While we have always had dedicated protections against each of these threats on Facebook, these improved systems have been specifically configured to identify and take action against suspicious Likes."

"To be clear, we do not and have never permitted the purchase or sale of Facebook Likes as we only want people connecting to the Pages and brands with whom they have chosen to connect. Beyond the need to maintain authentic relationships on Facebook, these third-party vendors often attempt to use malware or other forms of deception to generate fraudulent Likes, which is harmful to all users and the internet as a whole," it said.

"These improvements to our site integrity systems benefit both users and brands alike. Users will continue to connect to the Pages and Profiles they authentically want to subscribe to, and Pages will have a more accurate measurement of fan count and demographics. This improvement will allow Pages to produce ever more relevant and interesting content, and brands will see an increase in the true engagement around their content," according to the blog.

Facebook urged brands to "vet" businesses that provide "marketing services" aimed at enhancing their "presence" on the site. Companies should ensure that those firms only use "legitimate practices" to achieve that presence, it added.

Under Facebook's privacy policy users can control the extent to which their information is shared using settings on the site, limiting those who have permission to see their interaction on the site. However, when users 'like' company pages notice of that interaction is shared with their friends and the users can also receive updates from those company pages.

Facebook's statement of rights and responsibilities states that the social network's "goal" is to "deliver ads and commercial content that are valuable to our users and advertisers". Its advertising guidelines require that "ads and any offers promoted within ads must not be false, deceptive or misleading or contain spam."

Facebook said that it expects its crackdown on the fake 'likes' to result, on average, in the removal of "less than 1% of Likes on any given Page".

Under the UK's Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations traders face strict rules on the commercial practices they can engage in. The Regulations prohibit misleading commercial practices where businesses use "false information" that is "untruthful" in a way that indicates "direct or indirect sponsorship or approval of the trader or the product", and where it "causes or is likely to cause the average consumer to take a transactional decision he would not have taken otherwise."

This practice is known as 'astroturfing' as it fakes grass-roots support for a product or service. This is a criminal offence and business proprietors are potentially liable for an unlimited fine and a prison sentence of two years.