Facebook Kills Over 800 Accounts Related to US Mid-Term Polls

San Francisco: Facebook has removed 559 Pages and 251 accounts that consistently broke its rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behaviour related to upcoming US mid-term elections. Many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a network of Groups and Pages to drive traffic to their websites, the social networking platform said late on Thursday. “Many used the same techniques to make their content appear more popular on Facebook than it really was. Others were ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy at Facebook, said in a statement. The action is part of Facebook’s new policy against Pages, Groups and accounts created to stir up political debate — including in the US, the Middle East, Russia and the UK. (IANS)