April 01
In a social media purge ahead of the Lok Sabha Elections, the Facebook has announced that it is removing 687 pages and accounts associated with an IT Cell of the Indian National Congress.
The announcement comes just 10 days ahead of the first phase of the Lok Sabha Elections.
The individuals behind this activity used fake accounts, the majority of which had already been detected and suspended by our automated systems, and joined various Groups to disseminate their content and increase engagement on their own Pages, the social media giant, Facebook said.
“The Page admins and account owners typically posted about local news and political issues, including topics like the upcoming elections, candidate views, the INC and criticism of political opponents including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). While the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities, our review found that it was connected to individuals associated with an INC IT Cell,” Facebook said while detailing about the purge.
“We have also removed 103 Pages, Groups and accounts on both Facebook and Instagram for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behaviour as part of a network that originated in Pakistan,” Facebook said in a statement.
“The operations we found to be engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior were two distinct sets of activity in India and one network in Pakistan. We didn’t find any links between the campaigns we’ve removed today, but they used similar tactics by creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they were and what they were doing,” the statement added.