Facebook's purge disables hundreds of authentic Bangladeshi users profile

Facebook has waged an uphill war against fake news for the last couple of months now. And couple days back, it announced it's newest crusade: Fake accounts. In an announcement made by Facebook this Friday, the social media giant informed that it has launched a massive operation against a substantial number of accounts that it believes to be fake.

The announcement was made by Shabnam Shaik, Technical Program Manager of the Protect and Care Team of Facebook HQ. In a blog post that she wrote on last Friday, April 14th, she discussed how and what to expect after the purge. She stated: "Our systems were able to identify a large portion of this illegitimate activity – and to remove a substantial number of inauthentic likes. We also received help from our partners, who alerted us to suspicious activity that helped us identify additional accounts that were part of the same campaign. As we remove the rest of the inauthentic likes, we expect that 99% of impacted Pages with more than 10,000 likes will see a drop of less than 3%. None of these likes were the result of paid ads from the affected Pages."

She also mentioned that these purges are going to affect mostly in countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and other handful countries that have a long-standing history of having click farms. Through a click farm, anyone could buy one thousand like for their pages for as low as Tk. 1,200 or so. And these farms would earn as high as Tk. 1,50,000 per year for rendering these sort of services.

We reached out to Facebook for their official comment about this purge. Carson Dalton, Head of Communications at Facebook India responded our queries reiterating what Shabnam said before: 'We've made some additional improvements recently, and want to explain them here today. These changes help us detect fake accounts on our service more effectively — including ones that are hard to spot. We've made improvements to recognize these inauthentic accounts more easily by identifying patterns of activity — without assessing the content itself. For example, our systems may detect repeated posting of the same content or an increase in messages sent.' But he didn't, however, respond to the questions asking the exact number of accounts that were affected by the purge.

Interestingly, hundreds of genuine Facebook users have reported having their IDs being disabled after the purge. Some stated they got a notification stating that their IDs were disabled suspecting suspicious activity. We spoke to several of them. Mr. Badshah Mintu, a reporter from Prothom-Alo is also a victim of this purge. Being an IT reporter himself he shared his anger and frustration with BYTES. He said that due to professional reasons he needs to stay in touch with many people. He thinks that's the reason why Facebook mistook his ID with a fake one. He appealed couple days back but didn't hear back from Facebook yet.

Mr. Mahfuzul, another such victim of the purge got his ID back. He told BYTES that, after being disabled he appealed to Facebook with his driver license. Two days later he got his ID back and a message from Facebook saying his date of birth has been changed according to his Driver's license cause his profile had a different date of birth.

Brands and digital marketers, however, are relieved- thanks to the recent purge. A director of a reputed digital agency requesting anonymity said that this will help brands getting better ROI since fake like and engagements are the reason the conversation rate is poor in Bangladesh compared to other developed countries.