The war against the misuse of social media platforms, counterfeit accounts, the spread of false news and the misuse of users’ data for the social networking apps has been relentless recently and will continue to be in the foreseeable future. It is also possible to say that Facebook has been a leader in igniting this war, especially after the scandal of Cambridge Analytica, which affected Facebook users’ experience on the platform, which led to a sharp fall in the stocks of the parent company, that’s including Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp.

Hence, Facebook announced on its official blog that they are banning more than 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken Facebook’s policies and rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior. Facebook states the kind of behavior that lead Facebook to take this action, such as:

1. Many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a network of Groups and Pages to drive traffic to their websites.
2. Many used the same techniques to make their content appear more popular on Facebook than it really was.
3. Others were ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate.

As explained by Facebook:

“It’s why we continue to invest heavily, including in better technology, to prevent this kind of misuse. Because people will only share on Facebook if they feel safe and trust the connections they make here.”

Facebook has taken effective actions and put in appreciated efforts to provide a secure platform for its users worldwide before this step, such as only in June, Facebook rolled out new features on its platform, as a step on its way to fighting false news that has long been a tool for economic or political gains, then it launched new tools that enable users to review more information about any organization and the ads it’s currently running; they also can be given more additional information wasn’t available before, even if they don’t advertise, in addition to bringing more transparency to ads and Pages on Facebook.

In July, Facebook announced that they have updated their Terms of Service and data policies, in order to ensure a more data secure user experience. It also developed some new tools, that enable them to control the content and prevent hate speech, terrorism and war crimes, in order to make Facebook safer, such as “Cross Check” and “Minors”.