Italian researchers, who made us aware of the fake Twitter follower business a few months ago, have revealed that Facebook Page spamming has become a R2 billion business. Yes, R2 billion.

According to Facebook’s terms of service, “third-party advertisements on Facebook Pages are prohibited without our prior permission.”

The Italian team of researchers was led by Andrea Stroppa. She said what is happening is quite the contrary:

We’ve seen that every day there are at least 20,000 posts of wild spam pointing to e-commerce, fake news, affiliations, porn and often scams.

The researchers spent two days scouring underground spam forums (yes, they exist). They found 30,000 Facebook Pages on the forum, and checked for words like “click here,” “wow,” “free,” and “join” –  followed by links.

They found that these Facebook Pages, which used to be called “Fan Pages,” can be sold on the spam underground. Facebook Pages with less than 30,000 likes can be sold as spam posts from $8 (R82) to $20(R206). Pages with more than 100,000 likes, can cost up to $100 (R1,033) and for pages with over a million fans, the price can be $200 (R2,067).

Stroppa and the team of scientists spoke with a Facebook spammer who posed the question, “how many times do you see people sharing links on Facebook,” adding:

Facebook doesn’t ban us simply because we generate the content on Facebook itself. Everyday I materialize funny and interesting content full of phrases and so forth that is shared and liked by thousands of users.

Spamming on Facebook could start to hurt business, by driving users who become annoyed away from the social media platform.

Facebook said in a statement:

Protecting the people who use Facebook from spam is a top priority for us. We have developed a number of systems to identify spam and stop it from spreading, and we have mechanisms in place to quickly shut down Pages, accounts, and applications that are found to be in violation of our terms of service. We also offer tools for people to report Pages and posts that might be spam. We will continue to improve our spam-fighting systems so we can to ensure that the overall level of spam on Facebook remains low.

[Source: Mashable]