Facebook boots U.S. accounts spreading questionable political content
Facebook on Thursday said it has removed hundreds of U.S.-based pages and accounts for using some of the same disinformation-spreading tactics that Russians used during the 2016 presidential election.
The social media giant purged 559 pages and 251 accounts found to be breaking its rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior aimed at exploiting Facebook algorithms to boost the reach of content, Facebook officials wrote in a blog post. Much of the content the pages and accounts shared amounted to “clickbait” that used misleading headlines to drive users to ad-filled outside sites, they said.
Among the pages were a number that billed themselves as sources of news, typically with a partisan bent, a Facebook spokesman told POLITICO. They included one called Right Wing News, as well as Reverb Press, a left-leaning page, the spokesman said, adding that political leanings had no bearing on takedown decisions.
“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,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity and Oscar Rodriguez, a Facebook product manager, wrote in the post.
Others, they wrote, were “ad farms” masquerading as legitimate forums for debate.
The takedowns represent Facebook’s latest effort to combat misinformation and questionable content after facing massive blowback for failing to address those ills during the 2016 U.S. election cycle. Facebook spiked hundreds of dodgy accounts linked to Russia and Iran in August.