Facebook confirms it briefly limited White House official account

Washington: Facebook Inc confirmed Tuesday it had briefly blocked White House social media director Dan Scavino from replying to comments from a reader, saying it was aimed at stopping “automated bots” and had apologized to him.

The social media company said in an emailed statement that it caps “the amount of identical, repetitive activity coming from one account in a short period of time, such as @mentioning people. These limits can have the unintended consequence of temporarily preventing real people like Dan Scavino from engaging in such activity, but lift in an hour or two, which is what happened in this case. We’ve been in touch with him and have apologized for the inconvenience.”