A worker picks up trash in front of a new logo and name on a sign in front of a Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
According to Meta, around 50,000 Facebook users have been targeted.
Meta said in a post Thursday that it has warned the people who it believes were targeted by the malicious activities.
The companies have been banned from Meta's platforms. The action was taken against a number of companies. One is in India, one is in North Macedonia, and the other is in China. None of the firms responded to the request for comment.
Seven firms carried out a combination of activities. Some carried out all three, while others focused on one or two. The company, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, said that around 1,500 accounts have been removed from its platforms.
Meta said that the companies used hacking methods to get information on journalists and human rights activists in over 100 countries.
Meta's David Agranovich, director of threat disruption, and Mike Dvilyanski, head of cyber espionage investigations, wrote that the global surveillance-for-hire industry targets people across the internet to collect intelligence, manipulate them into revealing information and compromise their devices and accounts.
They said that the companies are part of a large industry that provides intrusive software tools and surveillance services indiscriminately to any customer, regardless of who they target or the human rights abuses they might enable.
Jake Moore, the former head of digital forensics at the U.K. police force, said in a statement that it is necessary to remove such accounts.
He said that it is difficult for Facebook to remove fake accounts and that it has previously struggled with spotting the fakes. It highlights that Facebook is a tool used in social engineering and even spying on people so users must be reminded to limit the amount of information they post on public social media.
This isn't the first big scandal of the year. In July, it was revealed that the NSO Group had used a program called Pegasus to target thousands of people.
Meta is taking legal action against the NSO Group, which was blacklisted by the U.S. government last month.
