Facebook removes over 800 accounts
Company cites rules violations
SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook said on Thursday it purged more than 800 U.S. publishers and accounts for flooding users with politically oriented spam, reigniting accusations of political censorship and arbitrary decision-making.
In doing so, Facebook demonstrated its increased willingness to wade into the thorny territory of policing domestic political activity. Some of the accounts had been in existence for years, had amassed millions of followers and professed support for conservative or liberal ideas, such as one page that billed itself as “the first publication to endorse President Donald J. Trump.” Facebook’s ability to monitor manipulation of users is under an intense spotlight in the weeks ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.
But Facebook named only five of the hundreds of pages it removed. Two of the page operators said that they were legitimate political activists, not profit-driven operators of clickbait “ad farms,” as Facebook claimed in a blog post. They said were still unsure which Facebook rules they had violated or why they had been singled out for behavior that is standard in online organizing.
“I would gladly abide by Facebook’s terms if I understood what they were,” said Chris Metcalf, publisher of the left-leaning “Reasonable People Unite,” which was shut down, along with eight additional Facebook pages, which he said had a total of 2.25 million followers. “I am a legitimate political activist. I don’t have a clickbait blog. I don’t have a fake news website. And I haven’t been doing anything that all the other pages in this space aren’t doing.”
In its post, Facebook described the pages, with names like “Nation in Distress” and “Reverb Press,” as largely domestic actors using clickbait headlines and other spam tactics to drive users to websites where they could target them with ads. The company said it was not taking issue with the nature of the content posted by the pages, but with the behaviors of the accounts, which used inappropriate tactics to artificially inflate their influence. Some of the pages and accounts had millions of followers.
Facebook said it shut down the accounts for having “consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” “People will only share on Facebook if they… trust the connections they make here.”
Facebook for years has tried to squeeze spam and clickbait from its platform. But Facebook has usually applied a softer punishment, down ranking the sites in its newsfeed so fewer people see them — not shutting them down altogether.
But ever since Russian operatives used Facebook to target American voters ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the company has been on a crusade to demonstrate that its platform won’t be used to disrupt the democratic process. False information peddled by foreign actors was clear-cut manipulation. But the same content, when spread by domestic actors, could be considered free speech — and a crackdown on it would be contrary to a principle social media embraces.
At stake is the company’s future ability to operate with minimal government scrutiny: Prominent Republican and Democratic politicians now say Facebook should be regulated more heavily if it cannot control a growing list of abuses, including foreign meddling and the spread of misleading news — and if it abuses its power to censor, as conservatives have repeatedly alleged.