The most important thing that anyone can do if they see something that violates our policies is report it to us. Reporting sends a signal to us that something is wrong, and helps improve the quality of your experience on our technologies in the long term. If you are a business, you can report ads or content that you believe harms your brand and violates our policies. You can report anything using these tools:
Keeping your account secure is our priority. We’re constantly evolving our technologies to make sure that your account is protected:
Our policies against impersonation apply to both Facebook and Instagram — people are not allowed to pretend to be someone that they are not, in order to mislead or deceive others. Creating impostor accounts is prohibited by our policies and these accounts are immediately disabled upon detection.
In 2024, we launched several new products to help protect businesses.
Scams are an industry-wide threat that target people across the internet and in the world at large. They are the work of bad actors who often work across borders, who use automation and other tactics to intentionally attempt to circumvent our detection. This is a financially motivated, adversarial space with scammers continuously evolving their tactics - using different services, sites, and tactics, a mix of ads or organic posts to target people and moving from one platform to another.
Over the years, Meta has made significant investments — spending $20 billion in teams and technology to protect the safety and security of our platform since 2016 — including combating scams. We have developed a multi-faceted approach to protecting users from scams which includes policies and systems that prohibit or disrupt this type of behavior across our services; tools and features to help people report fraud and better protect themselves; education campaigns; and collaboration with law enforcement to ensure real-world consequences for these bad actors.
Meta has policies that prohibit fraudulent and deceptive ads, including ads and posts that use public figures to mislead people, also known as “celeb bait.” We know that if people have a negative experience on our services, they will not continue to use them. And, advertisers may be wary of advertising on our services if they contain harmful or spammy content. We have every business reason to combat scams.
We also know that not all ads that people dislike necessarily violate our policies, and this is especially true for celeb bait. There are many ads featuring or referencing public figures that are allowed. For example, news publisher content promoting journalism about public figures.
Our approach to celeb bait is focused on the following areas:
We’re getting better at understanding the common traits of these ads and are using our learning to improve our automated detection systems and make our teams of reviewers better.
Scaled detection technology is important to prevent these ads. We’ve built additional detection models, specifically for celeb bait, that automatically incorporate what we have learned about the changing tactics used in ads to help us improve.
We’re holding bad actors accountable under the law, and addressing the wider ecosystem of enabling services that facilitate attempts by malicious actors to abuse our systems and bypass our detection and enforcement measures. Learn more here:
We are deeply committed to protecting intellectual property (IP) rights across our technologies.
We’ve built tools to help brands take action to protect their IP.
We also have additional tools like Rights Manager, our copyright management tool, and the Intellectual Property Reporting API, which allows reporters to programmatically report IP infringement at scale.
Keeping businesses, their accounts and people secure across our technologies is one of the most important responsibilities we have at Meta.
We require many businesses to undergo verification to confirm the identities of the business and its representatives before they can use certain tools or features. We’ve designed our systems and verification requirements to reflect the varied sizes, complexities and audiences of the businesses and organizations that use our technology.
Verification requirements include activities such as:
At Meta, we will continue to invest time and resources to fight security risks, however businesses also have an important role to play in keeping their accounts protected. Some of the best practices to help protect your business and personal account include:
Our library of tools and resources for scam prevention supports and reflects our policies. They outline what we do and don’t allow on our technologies, and have been thoughtfully created to help protect people and businesses.
These policies prohibit a wide range of harmful content types, including fraud and deception — content that purposefully deceives, willfully misrepresents or otherwise defrauds or exploits others for money or property.