Facebook purges pages for ‘coordinated’ fake behaviour

With less than two weeks before India goes to the polls, Facebook said it had removed more than 700 pages and accounts in India for “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” including 687 linked to an IT cell of the Congress party. The other 15 pages, groups and accounts that were taken down were associated with an Indian IT firm Silver Touch, which does a bulk of its work for the NDA government.

The Congress, however, said that none of the party’s verified Facebook accounts had been removed by the social media giant. “No official pages run by INC have been taken down,” the Congress tweeted on its official handle. “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.”

In a blogpost, Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher wrote that the people behind these pages and accounts coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves, while stressing that they were removed on the basis of their behaviour, not the content they posted.