Facebook takes away hundreds of pages of American news for spam

Facebook announced Thursday that it had removed hundreds of pages of US information that the company had coordinated to push users to pages full of ads and spam.

This withdrawal represents an escalation of society's battle against false news or sensationalist reports, after some legislators and users blamed it for not doing enough to stop misinformation before the mid-term elections of 6 November.

Facebook said in a company blog that it had removed 559 pages and 251 accounts "that consistently violate our spam policies and coordinated unauthorized behavior."

The pages and accounts were not deleted because of what they said, but for coordination as a network intended to drive Internet traffic to illegitimate websites covered with advertisements, said Facebook.

The people behind the pages were in the United States, not foreigners trying to influence the mediums, the New York Times reported.

"Many used the same techniques to make their content more popular on Facebook than it really was," said Nathan Gleicher and Oscar Rodriguez on Facebook. "Others were advertising farms using Facebook to mislead people into believing that they were legitimate political debate forums."

The deleted pages included both supporters and opponents of President Donald Trump, the Washington Post reported.

One of them, named "Nation in Distress", had gathered more than 3 million likes and followers, according to an archived version of the page still available Thursday. He published images and memes praising Trump and attacking Democrats.

Another version, "Reverb Press", had more than 774,000 subscribers, according to an archived version. He attacked Brett Kavanaugh, appointed by the Supreme Court and appointed to the Supreme Court, as a "nightmare for the country".

Facebook had already fought against sensationalist websites, but the company's approach was to limit their influence by modifying the algorithm that uses the Facebook feed, instead of completely removing Facebook accounts.

Alex Stamos, the former Facebook security chief who left the company in August, described the application takedown as the same policy that was used against Russian groups that published fake names before and after the presidential elections in August. 2016.

"Every day, the rules must be interpreted to address groups who intentionally seek out loopholes and blind spots," said Stamos. wrote on Twitter.