The company announced Thursday it will be taking down some 800 pages and accounts it finds are engaging in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” to profit from political debate in the United States and abroad.
It’s the latest move by Facebook to enhance transparency. Just last month, the company announced a new effort to combat fake video and photos by expanding its fact-checking. The steady drip of changes already had consultants changing tactics to adapt to its new internal regulatory regime. One digital consultant, recently writing in C&E, called the changes “painful.”
Now, Facebook is explaining the crackdown against groups of pages and accounts as an attempt to curb spam and “clickbait”-style content on the site.
“The people behind it create networks of Pages using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names,” the company wrote in a blog post Thursday. “They post clickbait posts on these Pages to drive people to websites that are entirely separate from Facebook and seem legitimate, but are actually ad farms.”
Those ad farms, the company said, were designed to “mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate.”
As a result of its finding, Facebook said it was removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that “have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” It said the timing was linked to the midterms and would help campaigns and groups using the platform by ensuring users “feel safe and trust the connections they make here.”
Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy and Oscar Rodriguez, product manager, added in their post: “Of course, there are legitimate reasons that accounts and Pages coordinate with each other — it’s the bedrock of fundraising campaigns and grassroots organizations. But the difference is that these groups are upfront about who they are, and what they’re up to.”
The Washington Post noted the accounts and page taken down in the purge publish content appealing to both the left and right of the political spectrum. Facebook said they were publishing “sensational political content.”
In addition to curbing inauthentic accounts and expanding its fact-checking, the platform has also rolled out new cybersecurity measures aimed at campaigns and groups. In a Sept. 17 post, Gleicher invited campaigns to apply for the program.
“As we have seen in past elections, candidates and elected officials, as well as their staff, can be targeted by hackers and foreign adversaries across platforms, including Facebook. However, due to the short-term nature of campaigns, we do not always know who these campaign-affiliated users are, making it harder to help protect them.”