If you belong to a Facebook group, you may have noticed last week that many began to change their privacy settings to “Secret” mode. That’s because bad actors are allegedly joining public Facebook groups, then flooding their pages with offensive content in order to get the group banned.

It’s unclear how widespread this problem is, but thousands of groups decided to play it safe and hid themselves anyway. And since every member of a Facebook Group receives a notification when the Group’s privacy settings change, this massive shift caused something of a panic among users. However, it seems to have been nothing more than a precautionary measure, instituted en masse by Group administrators.

For its part, Facebook confirmed the rumors by promising to restore Groups that had been removed because of the actions of saboteurs.

“We removed several Groups from Facebook after detecting content that violated our policies,” a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable. “We since discovered that this content was posted to sabotage legitimate, non-violating Groups. We’re working to restore any Groups affected and to prevent this from happening again.”

It seems as if not much actual damage was done during this episode, but it still serves as a valuable reminder to be extra careful while accepting friend requests (and Group requests) on the platform. You never know who could really be behind them.

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