Facebook Groups become the new target for spammers

The biggest challenge for digital platforms has been, being one step ahead of spam. While Facebook has been a constant target, the threat of spammers looms large on it again this week and this time Facebook Groups have been the target.

'Sabotage members' took to joining a wide range of Facebook groups as their new spam attack. They spammed these groups by posting offensive content which forced users to report the same.

The aim seemed to be to get groups to shut down through
the social network and these spammers seemed to be reaching their new target as
several groups were incorrectly shut down on account of this misuse.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to Vice: “We removed several groups from Facebook after detecting content that violated our policies. We've since discovered that this content was posted to sabotage legitimate, non-violating groups. We’re working to restore any groups affected and to prevent this from happening again.”

Facebook has been working to improve its content curation and rule enforcement efforts, while also pushing groups usage. Amidst these efforts, it would be fairly easy to carry out an attack of this kind.

Social media expert Matt Navarra recently tweeted: "Facebook’s hyper-focus on groups is ripe for abuse when it still allows anyone to quickly and easily spread content so far and wide in a few taps."

According to reports, many Facebook groups rapidly began switching to 'Secret'- a feature that allows groups to go unlisted. Hence, less exposed to these rising spam attacks.