Facebook announced on Thursday it took down over 800 pages and accounts in a clamp down on what the social media company calls “inauthentic behavior” in the lead-up to the midterm elections next month.
“Today, we’re removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior,” wrote Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy and Oscar Rodriguez, product manager, in a blog post.
“Given the activity we’ve seen — and its timing ahead of the US midterm elections — we wanted to give some details about the types of behavior that led to this action,” the post said.
“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,” the post continued.
The other pages and accounts were described as “ad farms” using Facebook to earn money and mislead people rather than engage in “legitimate political debate.”