Best Practices for Avoiding Sharing Schemes

Over the past few months, we have made updates to our Pages and our Branded Content policies banning Pages and Profiles from accepting compensation for systematically sharing large amounts of third party content, and we are increasing our enforcement efforts against such Pages and Profiles. These efforts align with our attempts to reduce clickbait on Facebook.

To help Pages and Profiles better understand and avoid these situations, we want to explain and outline here an example scenario based on what we’ve learned from Pages that previously have engaged in this practice.

Online “content mills” produce large amounts of website content commonly focused on superficial lifestyle topics intended to drive comments, shares, and ultimately, clicks. Example content they churn out can include numerous listicles or far-fetched stories with sensational headlines. In typical scenarios, these “content mills” - often presenting themselves as high-quality digital publishers - approach Pages with high follower counts, using them to distribute large quantities of the content mill’s articles or videos.

Here’s an example:

If you’ve experienced something similar to the above scenario and you’re in partnership with a third party, you are likely involved in a sharing scheme.

While we try to give Pages an opportunity to stop this practice before we take action, if your Page has been identified as being involved in a sharing scheme and the behavior continues, your Page’s distribution will be significantly reduced. This means that your posts will reach fewer people and accrue a much smaller number of views. Any scenarios that are in violation of our Pages terms are susceptible to having their distribution limited. Repeat abuse could also result in losing access to monetization features on Facebook. For specifics posts and Pages that have had their distribution reduced, appeals can be made through the Facebook notification that alerts you of the violation.

This is an ongoing enforcement effort that ultimately helps to better connect quality content with viewers and fans. We want to ensure Pages that have built meaningful audiences and fans are not taken advantage of by third parties aiming to exploit large followings for their own revenue purposes.

You should stop posting content from this provider and cease any relationship to ensure that your posts and Page are not negatively affected and your own distribution reduced. You can remove admins from your Page by following these instructions or change permissions of admins on your Ads Manager through these instructions.

We continue to expand and improve our monetization offerings to enable publishers and creators to monetize quality content and build engaged communities on Facebook. The best way to position your Page or Profile to earn meaningful revenue from our monetization programs such as Branded Content or in-stream ads is to share content that reflects your unique voice and keeps people coming back. In this vein, we recently launched an educational section focused on monetization within our Meta for Creators page. Check it out to learn more about Meta’s monetization programs.