Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a joint hearing of the Commerce
and Judiciary committees in Washington on April 10. (Alex Brandon /
Associated Press)
Facebook
said Thursday that it has purged more than 800 U.S publishers and
accounts for flooding users with politically oriented content that
violated the company's spam policies, a move that could reignite
accusations of political censorship.
The
accounts and pages, with names like Reasonable People Unite and Reverb
Press, were likely domestic actors using clickbait headlines and other
spammy tactics to drive users to websites where they could target them
with ads, the company said. Some had hundreds of thousands of followers
and expressed a range of political viewpoints, including a page which
billed itself as the first publication to endorse President Trump. They
did not appear to have ties to Russia, company officials said.
Facebook
said it was removing the publishers and accounts not because of the
type of content they posted, but because of the behaviors they engaged
in, including spamming Facebook groups with identical pieces of content
and using fake profiles.
"Today,
we're removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken
our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior," the
company said in a blog post. "People will only share on Facebook if they
feel safe and trust the connections they make here."
But
the move to target American politically oriented sites, just weeks
before the congressional midterm elections, is sure to be a flashpoint
for political groups and their allies, which are already attacking the
tech giant for political bias and for arbitrary censorship of political
content.
Ever
since Russian operatives used Facebook to target American voters ahead
of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook has been under immense
pressure to crack down on content that could disrupt the democratic
process in the United States. But the challenge of policing domestic
content is even thornier than going after foreign interference because
it is harder to define what constitutes legitimate political expression.
By removing the groups entirely, Facebook is effectively saying that
they will not have an opportunity to redeem themselves.
One
of the pages — "Nation In Distress" — pitched itself as the "first
online publication to endorse President Donald J Trump." Founded in
2012, it had amassed more than 3.2 million likes and over 3 million
followers, according to a Washington Post review on Thursday. In recent
posts and photos, it had criticized journalists for failing to report on
Trump's approach to China and shared a link to a story that had called
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) "demented." The page affiliated
itself with a website called "America's Freedom Fighters," which
appeared to post its own content and duplicate press releases written by
others about violent crimes and gun rights — all alongside a sidebar of
ads.
Another
page, Reverb Press, had more than 700,000 followers. Posts attacked
Trump and referred to Republicans as "cheating scumbags." Reasonable
People Unite, another left-leaning page that Facebook purged, had posted
a screenshot from a Twitter user who said, "Somewhere in America, a
teenage girl is listening to her parents defend Brett Kavanaugh and she
is thinking to herself, if something like that happens to me, I have
nowhere to go."
Facebook
has long struggled with where to draw lines around domestic content.
After the 2016 election, company executives declined to purge thousands
of misleading pages for fear that doing so would alienate conservatives,
according to two people familiar with the discussions.
“It
is totally reasonable for companies to say, ‘If you abuse our
mechanisms, we will punish you, even if the individual content is OK,’ ”
said Alex Stamos, who resigned as Facebook’s chief security officer
this summer and is now a Stanford University professor. “Facebook first
reduced the ability to use ads to punish extreme content. Now they are
attacking organic recommendation systems, such as the likes and shares
used to artificially inflate posts.”
Even
though Facebook removed accounts and pages, many of the sites that
appear to be behind that content remained alive and active elsewhere on
the web — a reflection that the challenge of stamping out potentially
misleading content online far transcends Facebook.
In
the “about” section of the now-suspended Nation in Distress page, for
example, was a link to the America’s Freedom Fighters website. That site
pointed to another suspended Facebook page and a still-active Twitter
profile, which continued posting even minutes after Facebook had taken
action against its accounts.
The
left-leaning Reverb Press, meanwhile, maintains an active website which
links to the disabled Facebook page, a still-available Twitter profile
and smartphone apps available for iPhone and Android.
Twitter didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither website immediately responded to a request for comment.
2:55 p.m.:
This article was updated with comment from Stanford professor Alex
Stamos and with information about the online presences of groups whose
Facebook pages were purged.
This article was originally published at 11:15 a.m.
This article was originally published at 11:15 a.m.
Comments
Post a Comment