Having found myself roped into assisting as co-administrator a couple of Facebook groups with security/privacy issues, I thought I should, perhaps, share what little I know about defending your group against scam and spam posts and comments by tightening up group settings.
Caveat: I've never really wanted to spend a lot of time administering Facebook groups - in fact I've only created one myself that is still active, and I'll tell you why later - and I haven't made a lifetime study of the subject.
Facebook tends to assume that your main ambition and purpose in life is to grow your group at all costs, and preferably devote several hours a day to that task.
There are two main types of groups: private and public.
A private group is one where only members of the group can see posted content and who are the admins.
A private group can be hidden so that no one can see the group unless they're already members, or are invited to join.
This gives the administrator(s) something close to absolute control over who posts and what is posted, and is particularly appropriate for groups where sensitive information is exchanged.
The more tightly controlled the group is, the harder it is for fake profiles to join.
The trade-off with a private group is that if you're intending to grow your group, it's harder for someone who might be interested and an appropriate potential member to happen across it and apply to join.
If you're attracted by the privacy advantages of a private group and are considering making your public group private, bear in mind that once you've gone that route, you can't revert it to a public group, because that constitutes a breach of the group members' privacy.
Formerly, this restriction only applied to groups with over 5,000 members, but now applies wholesale.
I don't administer any private groups, so I shan't risk any hostages to fortune by considering their privacy settings in detail.
It's worth noting that while even Facebook's own help pages sometimes contradict each other, it does seem as though there are other restrictions on large groups, such as how often and how many privacy changes can be made.
Since I was first pressganged into helping administer a group, some of the privacy settings formerly unique to private groups are now available to public groups.
Since public groups are, by definition, easier to find, join and share than closed or secret groups, even the most open-by-intent group needs to think about its privacy settings if it's to avoid some of the unpleasant spam/scam material that may be posted to a group if settings allow.
When I actually created a group - at any rate, one that is still active - it was in order to replace a page that was becoming increasingly frustrating to administer due to changes introduced by Meta that were overcomplicated, bug-ridden, and based on the assumption that I was running it as a commercial enterprise and constantly needed reminding to take actions that would increase my visibility and non-existent profits.
Participant Approval - if this is off, anyone on Facebook can post or comment, and group members can join chats.
My guess is that this will be more desirable in some groups than others: sometimes it's fair to be reluctant to be identified, but sometimes that privilege can be abused.
Clearly, this could be a lot of work in a popular group, but allows control of obviously malicious posts.
You can set it so that edits to posts must be approved: this helps to address cases where an approved post is edited maliciously by changing a link from something innocuous to something harmful.
This Cyber News was published on securityboulevard.com. Publication date: Sun, 24 Dec 2023 02:43:05 +0000