Facebook has filed more lawsuits against scammers this year than in all previous years combined, a legal strategy that could help it stave off regulation
When Facebook caught the New Zealand-based company Social Media Series Limited selling likes from fake users on Instagram, the tech giant did something out of character. Tweets: @newsalliance , @scottlucas86 , @scottlucas86 , @sivavaid , and @sivavaid Tweets: @newsalliance : Facebook Is Suing To Send A Message To Scammers — And Regulators https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Scott Lucas / @scottlucas86 : Facebook is suing scammers all of a sudden—but the real target is regulators, with the social media giant attempting to prove it can be trusted to police itself. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... via @CraigSilverman and @Kantrowitz Scott Lucas / @scottlucas86 : When Facebook caught the New Zealand-based company Social Media Series Limited selling likes from fake users on Instagram, the tech giant did something out of character. It sued. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... via @Kantrowitz and @CraigSilverman Siva Vaidhyanathan / @sivavaid : “It was Facebook's own negligence that allowed these situations to occur. In a sense, it's nice that they're closing the barn door ...” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... via @CraigSilverman Siva Vaidhyanathan / @sivavaid : “If they actually cared about people's data they would have been suing [companies] who violated the terms of service in 2005, 2007, 2010.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... via @CraigSilverman
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook spent 2019 building a litigation playbook against fake engagement: first the [[a:939096|federal suit against four China-based companies and three individuals selling fake accounts and likes]], then the US case against New Zealand's Social Media Series Limited over fake Instagram likes, which its anti-fraud team settled as an early win by October.
BuzzFeed's reporting argues the surge — more scammer suits this year than in all prior years combined — is aimed less at the defendants than at regulators, positioning Facebook as a platform that can police itself. The 2020 coverage shows the tactic generalizing beyond engagement fraud into data abuse.
First-order effects
- Sellers of fake likes, followers, and accounts now face US federal litigation rather than just takedowns, raising the cost of the fake-engagement business on Instagram.
- Facebook accumulates a public enforcement record it can cite when arguing against imposed regulation.
Second-order effects
- The same legal weapon turns on data abuse: suits against developers accused of scraping user data in the US and Europe, then BrandTotal and Unimania over browser-extension scraping, convert Facebook's terms of service into court-enforceable boundaries.
- Competing platforms and app-ecosystem intermediaries face pressure to match litigation-backed enforcement or be cast as lax by comparison.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, major platforms increasingly substitute private lawsuits for public regulation, with terms-of-service cases doing the work that access-control rules might otherwise impose — a shift regulators will weigh when deciding how much policing to delegate versus mandate.
The trend: Platform governance is shifting from moderation and takedowns toward litigation as both an enforcement tool and a regulatory argument.