Facebook Fights Fake Account Companies With Legal Action

Facebook Tackles Fake Account Companies

One of the biggest issues currently affecting Facebook and social media, in general, is the way in which news or even people can be manipulated to higher prominence. An example of this is companies who, for a certain fee, will allow targeted ‘likes’ or ‘follows’ off fake accounts in order to artificially inflate the numbers.

Think of it as you creating a 2nd Google account to get a YouTube subscriber, but on a much, much, larger scale. In a report via UberGizmo, however, Facebook has decided to launch legal action to stop this occurring in the future.

What Have They Done?

Facebook has reportedly launched legal action against 4 companies and 3 individuals. These are all believed to have all ‘sold’ fake likes on the social media platform. Although they have not spoken specifically on the legal action, Facebook has said that they want to: “reinforce that this kind of fraudulent activity is not tolerated.”

Well! It’s better late than never!

What Will This Mean?

This case will represent one of the first times that a social media platform has specifically addressed this issue. As above, the main concern surrounds the whole ‘fake news’ issue. Specifically, in that these companies can provide a lot of promotion to channels that may not really have it. This could, by proxy, lead to advertisers making offers based on inaccurate information.

Facebook already started a purge on this last year when they deleted around 500 million ‘fake’ accounts. It will, however, be interesting to see how these legal cases go. We’ll keep you posted!

What do you think? Is this a big problem for social media? Is Facebook right to take it to the courts? – Let us know in the comments!