Facebook Intensifies Effort to Disrupt Saudi, Indonesian Spam Schemes

Facebook is trying to thwart hackers based out of countries like Saudi Arabia and Indonesia from flooding pages with likes to fraudulently gain friends for spamming purposes, the social media giant’s care team announced in a statement.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The scheme involved inauthentic "likes" and comments that appeared to come from accounts located in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and a number of other countries, the statement explained.

"By disrupting the campaign now, we expect that we will prevent this network of spammers from reaching its end goal of sending inauthentic material to large numbers of people," Technical Program Manager Shabnam Shaik said in the statement on Friday.

The statement noted that Facebook has been working to combat the scheme for the past six months and had removed most of the abusers before the spamming had begun.

"We observed that the bulk of these accounts became dormant after liking a number of pages, suggesting they had not been mobilized yet to actually make connections and send spam to those people," the statement noted.

Facebook and other social media sites are under growing pressure to clean up content, especially following the 2016 US presidential campaign in which fake news reports proliferated in partisan attempts to sway voters.