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Facebook has removed several networks that broadcast far-right content to nearly 1.7 million people in Spain a few days before the national elections, which should see a surge of support for the far right party Vox.
The networks were discovered during an investigation by the Avaaz campaign group and were removed only after presenting their results to Facebook.
The discovery of a large network with politically sensitive content unattended before a key European election may add to concerns about the willingness and ability of social media companies to control hate speech and criminal activity on their sites.
On Wednesday, British MPs condemned Facebook, Google and Twitter for denying users to the police when they removed criminal posts, except in rare cases where there was an immediate threat to life or death. .
Spain will go to the polls for the third time in less than four years on April 28, after the country's Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has called early elections.
Sánchez announced the vote after the pro-independence Catalan parties joined the right-wing parties to reject the government's 2019 budget.
The Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) has been governing Spain since last June, after using a vote of no confidence to dismiss the corrupt, conservative People's Party.
But Sánchez struggled to achieve an ambitious agenda – including the exhumation of Franco – since he was running a minority government, holding only 84 seats out of 350 at the Spanish Congress.
Opponents of the PSOE accuse him of being weak and overly dependent on the Catalan separatist parties that helped bring him to power.
Polls suggest that the PSOE will get the most votes but will not have a majority.
However, he could take advantage of the fragmentation of the Spanish right following the emergence of Vox.
The leader of PP, Pablo Casado, has led the party far more right in the hope of eliminating the challenge of Vox.
The center-right citizen's party has also shifted to the right in recent months and has made the Catalan crisis a central element. His hard line on regional independence and the rigorous defense of Spanish national unity paid off in the Catalan regional elections of 2017, during which Citizens was the big winner. Its leader, Albert Rivera, vetoed a coalition with the PSOE, although many observers suspect he might rethink this position in the post-election horse trade.
Podemos, which, like Citizens, made a breakthrough in the 2015 elections, ending decades of duopoly PSOE and PP, has lost momentum in recent years. The anti-austerity party, born of frustration and outraged This movement seemed to have to leapfrog the PSOE and become the dominant leftist political force in the 2016 general election.
But mixed messages, internal divisions and an alliance with the United Left have done much worse than expected.
Podemos helped reinforce the Sánchez government, but very public internal quarrels blunted his message and weakened his image.
Photo: Jean Catuffe / Getty Images Europe
Avaaz discovered that Spanish networks spread false information, including a falsified photo of a political opponent hailing Hitler and misogynistic, Islamophobic and homophobic messages. They also co-ordinated the publication of identical messages apparently designed to resemble spontaneous messages.
However, in contrast to its decision earlier this month to ban British far-right groups as part of a crackdown against hate organizations, Facebook said it did not remove the pages in Spanish because of their content, or for its "coordinated inauthentic behavior" – the purified term of the network manufacturing and spreading false news.
Instead, Facebook stated that they were targeted for breaking the rules of the network. "We removed a number of counterfeit and duplicate accounts that violated our rules of authenticity, as well as a page for name change violations," said a Facebook spokesman. "We do not delete accounts or pages for unauthentically coordinated behavior.
"As in other cases, we deleted those accounts based on their behavior, not the content they published. Some additional pages were also disabled because they were only administered by fake accounts. "
The largest network – Unidad Nacional Española (UNE) – had more than 1.2 million subscribers and others reached hundreds of thousands of others. Together, they had more than 7 million interactions, at a time of intense political activity and focus on the rise of the far right Vox party.
Spain's apparent immunity from far-right politics finally dissipated last December, when Vox dramatically exceeded its expectations of winning 12 seats. in the Andalusian regional election. Feast of the citizens of the center right.
Founded by disillusioned members of the PP six years ago, Vox is expected to achieve its national breakthrough in Sunday's general election. Polls indicate it could garner around 11% of the vote, making it the first far-right party to win more than one seat in parliament since Spain's return to democracy after the death of General Franco in 1975.
The Spanish government has recently begun its own efforts to protect Sunday's general elections and next month's European elections.
The initiative, which aims to prevent cyber attacks and misinformation, is described as "a series of preventive, responsive and coordinated cybersecurity measures designed to ensure the free exercise of the rights and freedoms badociated with electoral processes". However, it does not seem to have been picked up on Facebook networks followed by Avaaz.
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