Facebook announced that it eliminated 32 accounts for what the company described as “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” ahead of the mid-term US congressional elections in November, IANS reported.
“This kind of behaviour is not allowed on Facebook because we don’t want people or organisations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they’re doing,” Facebook said in a statement, Efe reported.
“We’re still in the very early stages of our investigation and don’t have all the facts – including who may be behind this,” Facebook acknowledged, while adding that “whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past.”
The social media giant eliminated eight Facebook pages and 17 profiles, as well as seven Instagram accounts. “In total, more than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of these pages, the earliest of which was created in March 2017,” said Facebook.
Earlier, Facebook had been embroiled in a controversy during the 2016 US presidential elections for misusing millions of its users’ data after the Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal became public, reportedly allowing the device companies access to the data of users’ friends without their explicit consent.
Facebook’s leaders said that the kind of access exploited by the political consulting firm in 2014 was cut off by the next year as it prohibited developers from collecting information from users’ friends.
But the company officials did not disclose that such restrictions were not applicable to makers of cellphones, tablets and other hardware, the report said.
However, Facebook officials denied the device partnerships violated its privacy policies, the FTC agreement and pledges to users.
They said its partnerships were governed by contracts that strictly limited use of the data, including any stored on partners’ servers, adding that they knew of no cases where the information had been misused.
