Social media giant Facebook has removed 687 pages and accounts as it cracks down on fake accounts and spam.
The companies headquarter in US said the take-down included two networks.
One of the two was “individuals associated” with the Congress’s IT cell and the other by people linked to an IT firm called Silver Touch, a company that has worked for Modi’s official NaMo app for Bharatiya Janata Party.
Although Facebook named only one page “The India Eye”, which alone had over 2.5 million followers and was well established.
In the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls, Nathaniel Gleicher, the Head of cyber security policy at Facebook, said, “We didn’t find any links between the campaigns we’ve removed today, but they used similar tactics by creating networks of accounts to mislead others.”
Facebook said that these accounts were not removed on the basis of content or fake news but for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” and because they spread “spam”.
The social media giant also said that it had removed also removed around 103 pages, groups and accounts in Pakistan engaging in similar behavior.
The company claims that those accounts spread information about the Pakistani military, the Indian government and and Pakistani politics were linked to Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR).
“We are constantly working to detect and stop coordinated inauthentic behavior because we don’t want our services to be used to manipulate people. We’re taking down these pages and accounts based on their behavior, not the content they posted,” said Nathaniel Gleicher.
Congress took their official twitter page and clarified that no official pages run by them were taken down.
This is to clarify no official pages run by INC have been taken down. Additionally, all pages run by our verified volunteers are also unaffected.
In the mean time, we are awaiting a response from Facebook to provide us a list of all pages/accounts that they have taken down.
— Congress (@INCIndia) April 1, 2019
