Facebook will crack down on co-ordinated accounts that aim to cause social harm

Facebook already had a policy for inauthentic or duplicate accounts carrying out social harm in place. Now it has expanded that policy to a network of accounts, even if it is run by authentic profiles.

Facebook on Friday released a blog based on its threat report which notes that it will remove authentic actors who mean to cause social harm through their network of pages, accounts and groups. Facebook noted that the content violations are sometimes carried out by a tightly organsied group, which works together to amplify their members' harmful behaviour and repeatedly violates the platform's content policies. Facebook further noted that in such cases the potential for harm caused by the totality of network's activity exceeds the impact of an individual post or account.

“We have also seen authentic actors engage in adversarial and harmful behaviors on our platform and across the internet. In our recent Threat Report, we called out the trend in which threat actors deliberately blur the lines between authentic and inauthentic activities, making enforcement more challenging across our industry,” Facebook noted in a blog post. “As part of this framework, we may take a range of actions, including reducing content reach and disabling accounts, Pages and Groups,” it added.