To regain trust, Facebook purges over 800 political accounts
The social media platform says the accounts’ content was fine—instead citing dodgy tactics to justify their removal. The company wants to restore public trust after multiple data scandals.
Facebook wants to regain consumer trust—and it’s taken a major step by scrutinizing political speech on the platform.
The company announced it would remove more than 800 accounts—each with a strong political bent—that it says have engaged in tactics and actions that violate its user regulations. The company called the connections “inauthentic” and promised to crack down on bad actors.
It wrote in its online newsroom:
People need to be able to trust the connections they make on Facebook. It’s why we have a policy banning coordinated inauthentic behavior — networks of accounts or Pages working to mislead others about who they are, and what they are doing. This year, we’ve enforced this policy against many Pages, Groups and accounts created to stir up political debate, including in the US, the Middle East, Russia and the UK. But the bulk of the inauthentic activity we see on Facebook is spam that’s typically motivated by money, not politics. And the people behind it are adapting their behavior as our enforcement improves.
Facebook acknowledges its murky rules about what content pages and accounts can share.
It concluded:
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