social network - THE RIDGEWOOD BLOG.

The social network says it had been “combating” the operation for six months.

Facebook famously boasts it has 1.86 billion users who visit the social network every month. It looks like that number shrank on Friday.

The company, which previously announced it’s cracking down on fake accounts, said it’s disrupted a major spam operation being run out of Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and other countries.

“The apparent intent of the campaign was to deceptively gain new friend connections by liking and interacting primarily with popular publisher Pages on our platform, after which point they would send spam,” Shabnam Shaik, a Facebook technical program manager wrote in a blog post.

“We found that most of this activity was generated not through traditional mass account creation methods, but by more sophisticated means that try to mask the fact that the accounts are part of the same coordinated operation,” Shaik wrote. “By disrupting the campaign now, we expect that we will prevent this network of spammers from reaching its end goal of sending inauthentic material to large numbers of people.”

The number of authentic users matters for Facebook because the company charges marketers and advertisers to reach the most eyeballs. Facebook didn’t reveal the number of accounts affected by this crackdown.

https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-knocks-down-spam-network-fake-accounts/

by Paul Gallagher

Having a small social network is as bad for your health as smoking, according to a new study. Researchers from Yale University showed that a person’s position in the social network is associated with blood markers of stress. They discovered that the more people who would call you a friend the lower the levels of fibrinogen, a predictor of heart attack and stroke, in your blood. However, reeling off a long list of those we consider friends does not have the same effect. The number of friends and relatives named by an individual, reflecting the perceived social network, is only weakly related to fibrinogen levels. The association between social isolation and fibrinogen is comparable to the effect of smoking, and greater than that of low education, a conventional measure of socioeconomic disadvantage, the scientists said. What matters is how others see us, not how we see them.