Facebook AI Is Fighting Ad Cloaking To Control Fake News And Scams
James Kosur — August 17, 2017 — August 17, 2017
Facebook’s AI team is increasing its efforts to spot ads that lead customers to scams and fake news websites. The company is focused on “cloaking” which allows bad actors to create a seemingly valid ad only to redirect visitors to more nefarious destinations.
Cloaking has been used by black hat SEO experts for years and is a favorite among frauds, pornographers, and special interest groups who attempt to spread their messages and boost their presence in search results and across social media channels.
Facebook is already targeting pages that lead to content that is deceiving based on the ads being served. Bad actors are given warnings, lower visibility, and in some cases the ban hammer.
A Popular Cloaking Technique Is Now Under Fire
One of the more popular forms of website cloaking is to gain approval for a completely valid piece of content only to change the content to something more nefarious. Facebook approves the original ad only to have users directed to a website that offers completely different content.
“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,” Rob Leathern, Facebook product management director wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. “Cloaked destination pages, which frequently include diet pills, pornography and muscle building scams, create negative and disruptive experiences for people.”
Humans And AI Working Together
Facebook is using human reviewers to weed out spam but is also building an AI algorithms that will get better at spotting fake ads over time. “In the past few months, these new steps have resulted in us taking down thousands of these offenders and disrupting their economic incentives for misleading people.”
Racism And A Fight For Relevant Facts
The cloaking issue doesn’t just deceive users by convincing them to buy products or services, it has also become a major selling point for racists. Search for the term “Martin Luther King” and on the first page of Google you’ll be taking to martinlutherking.org, which promises “historical trivia, articles and pictures” in “a valuable resource for teachers and students alike.” The site is actually run by the racist group Stormfront.
While AI can assist Facebook with its cloaking efforts, it will still require a lot of human reviews. Facebook recently hired 3,000 people to deal with video issues and it may require thousands more to fend off bad actors and their growing list of cloaking techniques.
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