Facebook announced that it would take down hundreds of accounts and pages for breaking the company’s terms against “inauthentic” content and spam. In a blog post, it announced that 559 pages and 251 accounts would be removed.
Today, we’re removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior. – By Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy and Oscar Rodriguez, Product Manager.
Facebook says that the accounts will be taken down because they have consistently broken the company’s rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior. It states that such networks today increasingly use sensational political content, regardless of its political slant, to generate clickbait, earning money for every visitor to the site.
Many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a network of Groups and Pages to drive traffic to their websites – Facebook Newsroom.
Facebook noted the proximity and said that some of the networks were ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate. Facebook is concerned as the people behind this will change their tactics to evade detection. This has made Facebook invest heavily in better technology to prevent this kind of misuse.
