According to recent reports, social media giant Facebook has sued an India company named LeadCloak. Facebook has alleged that Basant Gujjar led LeadCloak has been feeding misinformation about the COVID-19 outbreak on social media platforms by violating their advertisement policies.
Facebook has filed the lawsuit in the federal court in California, stating that LeadClock has bypassed Facebook and Instagram automated advertising review process to inject fake news related to COVID, crypto, medicinal pills, etc. into their platforms. Apart from Facebook and Instagram, LeadCloak has also targeted other platforms like Google, Oath, WordPress, Shopify, etc.
Jessica Romero, Director of Platform Enforcement and Litigation at Facebook, explained that Gujjar has provided cloaking software and services to various entities, thus allowing them to go around Facebook’s automated d review process.
Apart from filing the lawsuit, Facebook has also imposed technical enforcement measures against LeadCloak and other companies that have used its software. Facebook has also disabled personal and ad accounts related to LeadCloak on Facebook and Instagram.
What is Cloaking?
Cloaking is nothing but a digital technique that circumvents ad review systems by concealing the information related to a particular website linked to an advertisement. Once cloaked, the ad-review process will come across a different product/service on the ad-linked website, while it actually might be selling some other product – in this case, false and misleading information about COVID-19, crypto, etc.
Facebook has confirmed that its lawsuit has provisions to further track LeadCloak’s users and take necessary actions against them.