Facebook has announced that in an effort to combat misleading and bad experiences on the platform, it is taking additional steps to remove bad actors that engage in ‘cloaking’.
Cloaking is a well-known, malicious tactic used by bad actors across the internet to circumvent ad and content review checks.
On Facebook, bad actors use cloaking to circumvent the platform’s review process and send people to websites and content that violate Facebook’s Community Standards and Ad Policies.
Bad actors who use cloaking are financially motivated and direct people to sites that promote things such as diet pills, pornography and muscle-building scams.
Facebook’s product management director, Rob Leathern, wrote in a blog post that the company will also be collaborating closely with other companies in the industry to find new ways to combat cloaking and punish bad actors.
“Over the past few months, we have been ramping up our enforcement across ads, posts and Pages, and have strengthened our policies to explicitly call out this practice,” he said
“We will ban advertisers or Pages found to be cloaking from the platform.”
Leathern said Facebook is using a combination of artificial intelligence and human review processes to help it identify, capture, and verify cloaking.
“We can now better observe differences in the type of content served to people using our apps compared to our own internal systems,” he said.
“In the past few months, these new steps have resulted in us taking down thousands of these offenders and disrupting their economic incentives for misleading people.”
