Facebook announced international, multi-jurisdictional litigation against two parties for violating its terms by deploying fake engagements and data scraping. This is a bold, uncommon move for a social media company, and one many people wouldn't have expected from Facebook.
Typically, when a social platform or any online-focused company that deals with a large number of users needs to stop some illicit activity, that process is handled by a Cease and Desist letter. The document is usually written by the company's lawyers and tells the offending party that they'll face legal action if they don't stop whatever the action is. These days, we most often hear about Cease and Desist letters in copyright-related situations, like when Nintendo issued one to a person who was leaking information on its upcoming game announcements.
When the letter doesn't work (meaning the offending party continued the action), the next step is litigation. In Facebook's case here, a blog post outlines the process that led to it taking legal action against a Madrid-based bot company that was issuing fake Likes on Instagram, and a data scraping service based out of California. It's a complicated, detailed process that most companies and defendants would almost always prefer to avoid, so the fact that Facebook is going this far is a sign the company takes these offenses very seriously. In both cases, Facebook says it issued Cease and Desist letters and banned the accounts involved, but the actions continued, leading them toward litigation. Furthermore, the offenses of the Spanish company are in violation of Spain's laws, and the ones from the American company violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, meaning these people are in pretty big trouble.
How These Actions Impacted Users
Fake engagement sounds like the kind of thing that shouldn't matter to everyday users, but it can be a serious problem. These kinds of bots usually make their creators money by selling fake Likes and other forms of engagement, such as comments. The downside for real people on those platforms is that it can ruin the conversation, spamming it with nonsensical, pre-generated comments. For people using social media for marketing reasons, these kinds of fake engagements make a page look illegitimate, which can hurt public perception and business. It also puts real content creators in competition with bots on the algorithms, clogging up the news feed.
The California lawsuit was against a data scraping service called Massroot8. Data scraping is the process of accessing information on social profiles or other outward-facing pages and compiling that information in a spreadsheet or other local storage. Data scrapers tend to sell that information to other parties, profiting from people's information. That's obviously a scary thought for the average social media user, as there's no way to know who sees the information we post and what they plan to use it for.
This is a particularly egregious issue today as the world tries to find a solution to the problems introduced by Clearview AI, a service that uses data scraping to find pictures of people that are then used alongside facial recognition software to build out profiles on them. Those profiles are sold to other parties like law enforcement and even some businesses, with no direct consent from the people themselves. This particular controversy was highlighted in a recent episode of HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
Source: Facebook