Facebook has removed 559 Pages and 251 accounts ahead of the US midterm elections for "coordinated inauthentic behavior," meaning spam posts motivated by political ends.
"Topics like natural disasters or celebrity gossip have been popular ways to generate clickbait. But today, these networks increasingly use sensational political content – regardless of its political slant," Facebook wrote in a blog post.
Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's Head of Cybersecurity Policy, explained that the fake accounts and Pages were using multiple accounts with the same names to post massive amounts of content across a network of Facebook Groups and Pages. Their goal, according to Gleicher and Product Manager Oscar Rodriguez, was to inflate the perception of post popularity to drive traffic to illegitimate websites and ad farms looking to capitalize on political debate.
"Like the politically motivated activity we've seen, the 'news' stories or opinions these accounts and Pages share are often indistinguishable from legitimate political debate," Facebook stated. "This is why it's so important we look at these actors' behavior—such as whether they're using fake accounts or repeatedly posting spam—rather than their content when deciding which of these accounts, Pages or Groups to remove."
According to The Washington Post, some of the banned Pages had names like "Nation In Distress," "Reasonable People Unite," and "Reverb Press," which boasted hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. The posts and photos on various Pages attacked both Republicans and Democrats.
As we saw during the 2016 election cycle, many of the social influence campaigns and advertisements posted by Russian troll farms and other nation-state actors were focused on sowing discord in the US election process, regardless of particular political slant.
Today's mass account and Page removal marks one of the first substantive actions since Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out Facebook's strategy to fight election meddling. Two of the primary categories Zuckerberg identified were stopping the bulk creation of fake accounts and stemming the spread of politically oriented misinformation.
This removal checks both of those boxes as the platform aims to curb the lucrative practice of making money off political content on social media. Odds are it won't be the last time Facebook and other social networks ban large swaths of fake accounts in the final weeks before the midterms.