Nearly 80% of Facebook spam are brand-damaging illegal streams, shopping and betting scams.
Here’s how to fight back.
Photo by Domingo Alvarez E on Unsplash
In the fast-paced world of brand building, engaging with fans authentically is paramount. However, maintaining this authenticity has become increasingly challenging due to the rise of illegal streams and other malicious content on social media platforms.
In this blog post, we'll delve into illegal streaming and brand safety, and explain how our new Illegal Stream Remover can be a gamechanger.
Did you know?
Nearly 80% of spam detected on Facebook included scam links: illegal streams, shopping scams and betting schemes. That’s a lot of effort by scammers to divert your fans away from legitimate channels.
50% of all spam comments Areto automatically removed from Facebook in September were mass replies to authentic commenters. This means that bots were deliberately targeting fans to spread unsolicited content.
The Scourge of Illegal Streams
Along with tackling abuse, harassment and spam, our community manager and content exec customers came to us with some specific and critical pain points related to their social media channels and brand communities, challenges relating to:
growing authentic engagement
protecting revenue streams
safeguarding brand image
Before jumping to conclusions, we did what we always do: test, learn, iterate. And as we monitored our customers’ social media accounts, we noticed some patterns emerge:
In a digital landscape cluttered with spam and fake content, it's challenging for brands to foster genuine interactions with their fans. The more spam we saw, the less engagement our customers were getting on their content.
The proliferation of illegal streams divert fans away from official platforms, causing financial losses for sports brands.
Spam, scams and malicious links in comment sections tarnish a brand's reputation and discourage authentic fan engagement. According to our research, when fans know they’re going to be targeted by a bot if they engage with official content, they choose not to engage more than 50% of the time.
That’s right! Illegal streams were detering fans from engaging, clogging the comments from flowing in our customers’ communities, and impacting their engagement and ability to grow super fans. It was also stopping them from understanding what content was resonating, and making it very challenging to grow a sense of community and brand safety.
Building our Illegal Stream Remover
Our team got to work to design a system that could detect illegal streams and other scam links. This also involved enhancing our emoji detection capabilities, because scammers ❤️ emojis.
3 things we knew our Illegal Stream Remover would need to do
After analyzing the data and talking to our customers, we had our marching orders. We knew that our Illegal Stream Remover would need to include features to simplify the task of boosting authentic engagement. This included:
Distinguishing between “good” and “bad” links: capture illegal streams, shopping scams and other malicious links from your social media pages while leaving safe links like news, videos and GIFs alone
Having spam detection coverage in top-level comments and comment replies: whether the bots are targeting your commenters individually or swarming posts with top-level comments, we needed to detect those comments everywhere
Staying relevant and keeping up with live conversations: because conversations happen in real time, we needed to build a feature that worked like our spam and abuse remover, and detect, analyze and remove illegal streams and other links as soon as they’re posted
Spam bots can get creative when it comes to evading traditional content filters on social media, like using conversational language to dupe people into clicking and engaging on their unsolicited content. Therefore we needed to train our models to analyze both the message content + link separately and as a whole in order to capture the widest range of spam content for our users.
Launching Areto’s new Illegal Stream Remover
Areto’s Illegal Stream Remover is designed to distinguish between malicious content and authentic engagement. This means that while it eradicates spam, it ensures that fans can still share safe links, team news, videos and GIFs without getting caught in the filter.
✅ Enhanced Scam Link Analysis: It swiftly identifies and removes illegal streams, shopping scams and other malicious links from your social media pages, without safe links, team news, videos and GIFs getting caught in the dragnet
✅ Comprehensive Spam Detection: Whether it's top-level comments or comment replies, Areto’s Illegal Stream Remover eradicates illegal streams and other scam links, allowing authentic fan interactions to shine
✅ Real-Time Moderation: It automatically detects and removes illegal streams in under 3 seconds, so scams disappears while authentic fan interactions stand out
We're excited about the potential of Areto’s Illegal Stream Remover to help brands increase authentic engagement. We believe it will empower you to foster more authentic fan interactions and safeguard your brand's reputation. (And so far, our customers are really happy with the results!)
