Facebook, on 1 April, removed 702 pages linked to the Indian National Congress and an IT firm named Silver Touch, as part of its exercise of removing pages that exhibit "inauthentic co-ordinated behaviour."
Facebook had said that the pages removed were 'misleading' and the people behind them had coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves.
However, there seems to be another set of hundreds of right wing pages/accounts that have been removed or unpublished from the platform, including big platforms like Postcard News and MyNation. Admins of right-wing and pro-BJP pages across social media are complaining about their accounts or pages being blocked by the platform.
Facebook, in its statement said that these accounts were removed for violating community guidelines. It said that these accounts, including the 702 that were blocked, were taken down based on their behaviour, and not the content they posted.
People associated with the right wing have expressed surprise and anger at Facebook, asking the company for a reason and even going on to accuse Facebook of election manipulation.
According to the reports, the pages have either been unpublished, blocked or served discriminatory notices. Journalist Abhijit Iyer Mitra said on Twitter that he is consulting his lawyers to check if there is grounds for filing a case of treason.
AltNews' Pratik Sinha tweeted that a person who runs a website Hindutva.info said that right wing pages that amassed about 15-20 crore likes have been cleaned up by Facebook. Another person, Raghavendra Veram, who had more than 2 million likes on his Facebook page, has also claimed to have lost his page in this move by Facebook.
The Print talked to one of the affected admins, Rajesh Jindal, a Chandigarh-based businessman. Jindal told the website that he has nothing to do with the IT cell of the BJP or any other party but said that a lot of the content on his page was nationalist and Right-leaning.
“It is ridiculous to see Amit Malviya [BJP IT Cell chief] celebrate when we have been affected far more than the Congress. He’s behaving as though he did a surgical strike on the Congress but he has nothing to do with what has happened.”Rajesh Jindal to The Print
Engaging in Behaviour That Violates Facebook Policies
Now, all these right wing pages being removed – roughly 200, according to a report by The Print, seem to be a larger part of Facebook’s purge of political pages that violate its policies.
In the statement released on 1 April, highlighting the removal of the above-mentioned 702 pages, Facebook also said that it removed an additional 227 Pages and 94 accounts in India for violating its policies against spam and misrepresentation, without naming any of the 321 pages/accounts.
Facebook said that these pages and accounts “were engaging in behaviours that expressly violate our policies.”
The statement further said that the people behind this behaviour create pages using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names. They then post clickbait posts on these pages to drive people to websites that, although entirely separate from Facebook, seem legitimate but actually are ad farms.
“These people behind also post the same clickbait posts in dozens of Facebook Groups, often hundreds of times in a short period, to drum up traffic for their websites. And they often use their fake accounts to generate fake likes and shares. This artificially inflates engagement for their inauthentic Pages and the posts they share, misleading people about their popularity and improving their ranking in News Feed.”Facebook statement
Facebook says that this is different from the Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour which was the reason for the 702 pages being removed on Monday, 1 April.
"This activity does not represent a single or coordinated operation (like the 702 pages linked to INC, Silvre Touch and the Pakistani Army) — instead, these are multiple sets of Pages and accounts that behaved similarly and violated our policies," Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy, Nathaniel Gleicher said in the statement.
The Print report called this kind of online activity – abuse by individuals or “civic spam”. It said that if Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour is organised crime, civic spam can be categorised as petty crimes.
(With inputs from The Print)
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