Facebook Groups Targeted by Spammers in New Wave of Misuse

It's difficult for Facebook - and indeed, any digital platform - to stay ahead of spammers and those looking to misuse their tools for unintended purposes.This week, a new kind of spam attack came to the fore, with 'sabotage members' joining a range Facebook groups, posting offensive content to them, then reporting said groups, in order to get them shut down by The Social Network.And it worked - Facebook has confirmed that several groups were incorrectly shut down due to this new type of attack.As 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.”With Facebook working to improve its content curation and rule enforcement efforts, while also pushing groups usage, this type of attack would actually be very easy to carry out.For example, social media expert Matt Navarra recently shared how easy it now is to share an update to several groups all at once.