With just weeks until the midterm elections, Facebook has deleted hundreds of political accounts and pages for violating their terms of service. In an announcement, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy Nathaniel Gleicher and product manager Oscar Rodriguez asserted that it had nothing to do with ideology, but rather with what the offending accounts did on the site.
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. 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.
The New York Times notes that the crackdown reflects how some Americans started taking some pages out of the Russian disinformation campaign handbook. Right Wing News, for example, made numerous fake accounts and pages to push out misinformation.
After Dr. Blasey testified, Right Wing News posted several false stories about her — including the suggestion that her lawyers were being bribed by Democrats — and then used the network of Facebook pages and accounts to share the pieces so that they proliferated online quickly, social media researchers said.
Experts say we should be concerned because having Americans become the source of these campaigns brings up freedom-of-speech concerns. “Domestic disinformation is harder to root out than foreign disinformation,” researchers told NYT, “because in many cases it mirrors genuine networks of Americans engaging in free speech online.”
The only reason these pages got banned was because they were breaking the rules and making a bunch of fake accounts. With Facebook’s reacting to that part of it, it won’t be long before they figure out a new way. And how much more damage will be done until the next wave of fake news peddlers are discovered?