【Watch Kalakal Online】

Facebook is Watch Kalakal Onlinetaking aim at scammers who use bait-and-switch tricks to sneak sketchy ads past its inspectors.

Hackers have long been able to bypass the social network's rules against ads for things like diet pills, pornography, and gambling through a practice called "cloaking." Cloaked ads are made to link to a different page when clicked by the company's vetting team.

SEE ALSO: Facebook and Google are destroying bad online ads, which is great until they own the world

No longer, Facebook says. The company has built new artificial intelligence software to detect cloaking attempts and added more people to its review staff to identify them manually.

"We don't want these bad actors and these negative experiences on the platform whatsoever," says Facebook product director Rob Leathern, who's in charge of policing the site for nefarious activity. "The effects it has on people--it's jarring, it's a bad experience--so we're committed to addressing it."

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The company has been working to choke off these sorts of schemes for years by bulking up its vetting capabilities. But it's been much more public about its misinformation battles in general in recent months because of public scrutiny on its role in spreading fake news and pressure from advertisers who are skeptical of its black-box metrics.

Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up!

While cloaking clearly remains a headache for Facebook's enforcers, it's gotten much harder to pull off, according to various hacker forums. Doing so now requires a list of all the various IP addresses and traffic fingerprints of Facebook's review teams and third-party partners as well as knowledge of how its automated systems work.

Still, it's easy to find websites that purport to offer such services. Many of them come with a disclaimer about their risky nature.

"Cloaking isn't magic, and it isn't some get-rich-quick thing," one of these warnings reads. "It’s a war between the marketer and the ad networks [and] search engines—a constant back and forth."

It’s a war between the marketer and the ad networks [and] search engines—a constant back and forth.

Facebook hopes that its latest crackdown will finally up this risk to the point where it no longer makes economic sense for marketers to even try.

"We want to increase the costs for these scammers so they have less incentive," Leathern said. "We want to make it clear to the bad actors out there that we're ramping up enforcement--we'll take down ad accounts, we'll take down pages."

The push is part of a broader effort to drum out misleading content of any kind from the platform that Facebook's been publicizing heavily since last year's presidential election. Other moves have included shutting down vast bot networks used to defraud advertisers, suppressing links from websites with bad ad experiences, and adding warning labels to links from sites that tend to get low ratings from reputable fact-checkers.

---

Featured Video For You

---

Taking a virtual selfie in Facebook Spaces is mind-boggling

---

Topics Facebook Social Media

• Digital Culture
• Deals
• Games
• Social Good
• Entertainment
• Tech
• Science
• Life

• Looking for Twin Peaks
• McDonald's viral Grimace shake TikTok trend actually boosted sales
• Redux: Lovers Surprised by Love by The Paris Review
• Staff Picks: Hauntings, Hollywood, and Home by The Paris Review
• Stormbound
• Ennio Morricone Plays Chess by Alessandro De Rosa
• Nudes by The Paris Review
• Every iPhone 16 model may get a new and improved 'Action' button
• Firing Lines
• The Genius of Terry Southern by David L. Ulin

• Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic presidential candidate, sues Google for ‘election interference’
• Here's how much cheese Americans eat per year
• The best cheese
• Steve Ballmer went wild while introducing Kawhi Leonard, Paul George
• Amazon tweets article warning robots will replace workers if John Oliver isn't nicer
• Uber gives cities a peek under the hood, sharing trip data with new tool
• How boring your state is, based on its favorite ice cream flavor
• Everyone thinks this Belle doll looks like Justin Bieber (and they're not wrong)
• 'Fortnite' update lets you watch 'Fortnite' while playing 'Fortnite'
• Think FaceApp's privacy policy is sketchy? We've got some news for you.

• No Mothers, No Daughters
• How to watch 'GTA 6' trailer
• Why TikTok's 'blueberry milk nails' are sparking backlash against trend culture
• How to use N
• K Street Taxpocalypse
• Ennio Morricone Plays Chess by Alessandro De Rosa
• Why NPC streamers are trending on TikTok Live
• Poetry Rx: Suddenly Something Snaps by Kaveh Akbar
• Fresh Hell
• How to use N

• Bolsonaro Rising
• These Are Not the Margins: An Interview with Bryan Washington by Nikki Shaner
• Redux: Lovers Surprised by Love by The Paris Review
• Whiting Awards 2019: Nafissa Thompson
• America Shoots Itself
• Whiting Awards 2019: Tyree Daye, Poetry
• Meet Carrie Bradshaw's biggest critic
• Wordle today: The answer and hints for December 3
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti Overclocking Guide
• Staff Picks: Hauntings, Hollywood, and Home by The Paris Review