Meta, the parent company of Facebook, on Monday, said it has stepped up efforts to sanitise its platform, announcing that it removed 500,000 accounts for spam and fake engagement in the first half of 2025.
The move forms part of a wider clampdown on impersonation and copycat content, aimed at giving more visibility to original creators.
In addition to the half a million spam accounts, Meta said it took down nearly 10 million fake profiles pretending to be popular content producers.
“We’re making progress, In the first half of 2025, we took action on around 500,000 accounts engaged in spammy behaviour or fake engagement, applying measures ranging from demoting their comments and reducing the distribution of their content to preventing these accounts from monetising.
“We also took down around 10 million profiles impersonating large content producers,” Meta said in a blog post.
Meta is also introducing tougher measures to tackle accounts that recycle or repost content from others without permission or meaningful edits.
Such accounts will not only lose access to monetisation but also suffer reduced reach on Facebook feeds.
According to the company, repeatedly sharing unoriginal material, whether videos, photos, or text harms the platform by making it harder for fresh voices to break through.
To help protect genuine creators, Meta is testing new tools that link duplicated content back to the original post.
The aim is to surface authentic work and ensure the right people get the credit.
Meta said pages and profiles that post mostly original content tend to enjoy wider distribution across Facebook.
Simply stitching clips together or adding a watermark will no longer count as meaningful editing.
Content that provides real value and tells an authentic story is likely to perform better.
The company also warned against sharing watermarked material from other platforms, saying this could lead to penalties, including reduced reach and loss of monetisation.
Captions should be kept relevant and clear, avoiding the overuse of hashtags or unnecessary links.
Meta said the new rules will roll out gradually over the next few months.
As part of the update, the company has added post-level insights to the Professional Dashboard to help creators track how their content is performing.
Content creators can now check the Support Home screen from their Page’s main menu to see if they are at risk of facing restrictions on their posts or earnings.
Meanwhile, Google’s YouTube has also announced a new policy that prevents mass-produced or overly repetitive content from earning advertising revenue.
The update sparked confusion on social media, with some users fearing it was a reversal of YouTube’s stance on AI-generated content.
However, the platform clarified that the rule targets spammy, low-effort uploads not creators who use AI to enhance their storytelling.