"By disrupting the campaign now, we expect that we will prevent this network of spammers from reaching its end goal of sending inauthentic material to large numbers of people," Technical Program Manager Shabnam Shaik said in the statement on Friday.
The statement noted that Facebook has been working to combat the scheme for the past six months and had removed most of the abusers before the spamming had begun.
"We observed that the bulk of these accounts became dormant after liking a number of pages, suggesting they had not been mobilized yet to actually make connections and send spam to those people," the statement noted.
Facebook and other social media sites are under growing pressure to clean up content, especially following the 2016 US presidential campaign in which fake news reports proliferated in partisan attempts to sway voters.
