• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, August 9, 2017

Continuing its content-cleanup efforts, Facebook is taking additional steps to curb “cloaking” on its platform.

Cloaking is a malicious tactic used by bad actors to circumvent ad and content review checks. Often, it sends users to websites and content that violates Facebook’s community standards and ad policies. 

“Over the past few months, we have removed thousands of these offenders from the platform and continue to ramp up our enforcement,” a company spokeswoman said on Wednesday. 

“Bad actors who use cloaking are financially motivated and direct people to sites that promote diet pills, pornography and muscle-building scams,” she said.

Going forward, advertisers and pages caught cloaking will receive a ban from the platform.

Facebook is employing artificial intelligence for its anti-cloaking initiative. The tech titan has also expanded its human review processes to better identify, capture and verify cloaking.

“We can now better observe differences in the type of content served to people using our apps, compared to our own internal systems,” Rob Leathern and Bobbie Chang, a product management director and software engineer at Facebook, noted in a co-authored blog post.

By its own account, Facebook is getting better at spotting spam, bogus accounts, fake news and con jobs.

“We’ve made improvements to recognize these inauthentic accounts more easily by identifying patterns of activity … without assessing the content itself,” Shabnam Shaik, a technical program manager on Facebook’s Protect and Care Team, recently noted.

Along with curbing dubious content, Facebook has also recently promised to be more transparent with buyers about where their ads run on the network.

As part of that effort, the company recently began letting a select group of advertisers see a list of potential publisher destinations. Facebook plans to offer the feature to all its Audience Network partners before the end of the year.

The tech titan also plans to let advertisers apply their block lists at the account level. Beginning with Audience Network and Instant Articles, the option should be extended to in-stream ads on Facebook later in the year.

Soon, Facebook plans to allow Audience Network partners to specify what types of placements -- whether in-stream or native -- they want their video campaigns to run in through an opt-out format.

At present, Facebook already offers several ways for brands to determine where their ads run. They can always opt-out of Instant Articles, Audience Network or in-stream ads on Facebook, as well as exclude delivery of their ads to sensitive categories -- like dating and gambling.