Facebook comment threads on posts from popular pages and in groups are filled with two types of spam: 1) Telegram links, and 2) presumably fake profiles claiming to “testify” or “give testimony” of an individual who made them a bunch of money via stocks or crypto. Often, these comments outnumber the genuine comments. These all follow an extremely basic format. A few simple could be drafted in 15 minutes that would have high recall AND precision. How have they still not solved this problem? The photo below shows two examples. Personally, I think that there must be some sort of monetary benefit to keeping them, like inflating the apparent activity on the platform. I am curious if anyone from Facebook can clarify or provide an alternative hypothesis. Edit in context of a few comments: the comments in question are scams from likely fake accounts. This is not just low-quality content or content that contains views that differ from the mainstream. Removing these has nothing to do with free speech.
You still use Facebook?
FB made $30B in last year so lot of people must be using it.
fewer people use twitter
You should make a solution that catches 100% of these spam comments and sell it to Facebook. We would buy it for at least 1 billion.
Facebook would buy it and never use it
Like it never uses WhatsApp or IG
Wow the first 3 comments on this post are incredibly useless. I personally believe that Facebook benefits from content, the quality of which matters much less than the volume. I don’t think they’re really incentivized to improve it.
This is what I think. It seems simple enough to solve that they must be letting it occur knowingly.
It would hurt the DAU numbers to address the issue 🙄
Then you will have to explain to congress why you are censoring speech ;)
Removing scams isn’t censoring speech.
Who decides what a scam is?
So you want FB to be the police of free speech? Just because something could be done, doesn't mean it should.
This isn’t about free speech. The comments are made by fake accounts trying to scam people.
What's the difference? Where's the line? Is mlm a scam? How about timeshares? What about use car lots, is that a scam? Defining speech is not nearly as easily as we would hope. I'm not for scams but if real people want to post that the sky is purple and their pyramid scheme is awesome let them. You can block them or sort comments by value.
Story of my life. I admin a group and am constantly removing Nigerian spammers. When I report the profiles as fake I’m told “this doesn’t violate our community guidelines”
Someone who works at Facebook should do something!
Yes, this is exactly what I am referring to. If they are letting it happen because they think it benefits them, I think they are being shortsighted. It drives people off the platform.
Why would anyone sane be on Facebook other than attention seeking desperate ones who r on FB because one like on their photo gives them the high of making $200 million in 1 day..
it’s yo keep the E N G A G E M E N T metrics high.
imagine participating in posts from popular pages on facebook LOL
I use it for advertising, and it is extremely annoying to see spam in comments on my advertisements.
so basically you're mad that you had to pay in order to spam other people's feeds while these people are doing it for free 😂😂