Facebook, on Thursday, announced that they’ve removed 559 pages and 251 user accounts because they’ve been associated with consistently breaking the social network’s rules pertaining to spam and coordinated inauthentic behaviour.
In recent years, Facebook has seen a growing number of pages that have been trying to mislead the users and tried to spread political propaganda via their posts. Other than these, pages and accounts have also been found that sell counterfeit items.
In addition to USA, the company has enforced similar policies to pages, groups and accounts in the Middle East, Russia and UK.
This is being done by the company ahead of US midterm elections. Earlier this month, Facebook also announced that they’d be fighting fake news in India as the country approaches elections in 2019.
Also read:Â Facebook is now bringing Safety Check feature to Workplace messaging service
Other than the groups spreading political misinformation, Facebook is also putting its efforts into battling pages, groups and accounts that are selling fake products for monetary gains.
“This year, we’ve enforced this policy against many Pages, Groups and accounts created to stir up political debate. But the bulk of the inauthentic activity we see on Facebook is spam that’s typically motivated by money, not politics,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy.
“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. Many used the same techniques to make their content appear more popular on Facebook than it really was.”
“Others were ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate.”
Earlier this year in August, Facebook removed 32 pages as the company cited that ‘they were involved in coordinated inauthentic behaviour’.
In a separate incident in August, the company removed 18 Facebook accounts, one Instagram account and 52 Facebook pages, which were followed by 12 million people in Myanmar. This was done in an effort to diminish the spread of hate, discrimination and misinformation via the social media platform.
Also read:Â Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tinder aiding human traffickers: Study