Around 800 US accounts has been purged by Facebook as they were behind flooding the social media users with content that was politically oriented. It also violated the scam policies of several companies which could lead to reigniting the political censorship accusations.
Pages and accounts like Reasonable People Unite and Reverb Press were suspected to attract users by use of click-bait headlines and various tactics to spam and target them by using ads. Some of these pages had thousands of followers and had content about political viewpoints and also had a page that billed to endorse President Trump. They had not ties with Russia.
Facebook said that it was not only the objectionable content, but also the behavior of these account holders like spamming groups with identical content and use of fake profiles due to which their accounts were removed.
The company said,
Today, we’re removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior. People will only share on Facebook if they feel safe and trust the connections they make here.
This targeting of politically oriented sites will definitely serve as a flash point for the political groups and their allies which have been attacking Facebook due to reasons of arbitrary censorship of political content and political bias.
It all began when Russian operatives started using the social media giant for targeting the American voters before the US presidential election of 2016. Since then, Facebook has been pressurized to bring down such pages and accounts that could act as a disruption to the democratic process. It has been a tough challenge for Facebook as it is hard to determine the legitimacy of political expression rather than going after foreign interface.
Page like ‘Nation In Distress’ showcased itself as the “first online publication to endorse President Donald J Trump and had around 3 million followers. Even after removal of such accounts, these sites are actively working elsewhere on the web.
Source: latimes, washingtonpost
