Facebook to help address the spread of misleading experience on the platform
The company will ban advertisers or Pages found to be cloaking from the platform.
Facebook has always been working to combat the spread of misinformation and the financially-motivated bad actors that create misleading experiences for people. Today the company shares additional steps they have taken to remove even more of them from Facebook, so that what people see after clicking an ad or post matches their expectations.
Some of the worst offenders use a technique known as “cloaking” to circumvent Facebook’s review processes and show content to people that violates Facebook’s Community Standards and Advertising Policies. Here, these bad actors disguise the true destination of an ad or post, or the real content of the destination page, in order to bypass Facebook’s review processes.
For example, they will set up web pages so that when a Facebook reviewer clicks a link to check whether it’s consistent with our policies, they are taken to a different web page than when someone using the Facebook app clicks that same link. Cloaked destination pages, which frequently include diet pills, pornography and muscle building scams, create negative and disruptive experiences for people.
Since cloaking exists across many of today’s digital platforms, Facebook will also be collaborating closely with other companies in the industry to find new ways to combat it and punish bad actors. Over the past few months Facebook has been ramping up our enforcement across ads, posts and Pages, and have strengthened their policies to explicitly call out this practice. The company will ban advertisers or Pages found to be cloaking from the platform.
How Facebook Identifies Cloaking
Facebook is utilizing artificial intelligence and have expanded their human review processes to help identify, capture, and verify cloaking. The social media giant can now better observe differences in the type of content served to people using their apps compared to their own internal systems.
In the past few months these new steps have resulted in Facebook taking down thousands of these offenders and disrupting their economic incentives for misleading people.
How Will This Impact The User’s Page?
Facebook sees cloaking as deliberate and deceptive, and will not tolerate it on the platform. The company will remove Pages that engage in cloaking. Otherwise Pages should not see changes to their referral traffic.