Facebook Sinks To New Lows, Uses Two-Factor Authentication To Spam Users

The two-factor authentication system is meant to provide users with extra security to protect themselves from threats like getting hacked or getting spammed. Facebook, like many other tech companies these days, employs this system. However, it seems the company is now using the security measure to spam users who have left the social network or haven’t been using it that much, which is a new low for the controversial entity.

As Gizmodo notes, Facebook is losing a lot of users. It’s still on the two billion mark with its global audience, but Americans under 25 years old have been abandoning ship. 2.8 million of them actually left the social network last year. That may not seem like such as huge number when compared with the overall score, but it presents a troubling trend for Facebook.

This has prompted the company to become more desperate and use more aggressive measures to retrieve those lost users. Aside from the usual fare of email reminders, it seems users are now reporting getting spam texts from Facebook on their mobile numbers, which the social network asked for as part of the two-factor authentication process.

Receiving Facebook notifications via text is bad enough, but it seems a lot of them are about telling users what their contacts are doing on the platform. Far from convincing users to come to the social network, however, this practice has only served to make many of them angry at the intrusion.

To make matters worse, it seems some users are accidentally telling friends and family to “go to hell” when they reply to the spam, Mashable reports. In terms of the optics of this development, Facebook is not coming off in a flattering light.

As some users have put it, the social network is acting almost like a desperate former lover who resorted to stalking and leaving creepy messages in an attempt to woo them back. It’s not a good situation to be in for the users.