More Than 1,000 Pages Disappeared Out Of Facebook Ahead Of India’s Election

Jyotis - Apr 02, 2019

This is not the first time Facebook has conducted a specific action to prevent others from manipulating its platform for their own sake in elections.

On April 01, Facebook just claimed that up to 1,126 pages, accounts, and groups have been removed out of its platform before India’s election official begins. A large number of these accounts which comes from Pakistan and India were attached with a flag due to their “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

More particularly, Facebook killed 702 pages, accounts, and groups that are linked with 02 networks from India. The next 103 pages, accounts, and groups (from both Instagram and Facebook) were removed because they were connected to a network from Pakistan. The last 321 accounts and pages were handled due to their violation of Facebook’s rules concerning spam.

This is not the first time Facebook has conducted a specific action to prevent others from manipulating its platform for their own sake in elections. At the beginning of March 2019, the company deleted 137 accounts from the United Kingdom due to the nation’s political tension. Back to January 2019, over 900 pages from Indonesia and Iran disappeared out of the famous social networking platform when they were detected with “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

In 2018, before the elections took place in Bangladesh and Iran, a series of Facebook pages were also killed for some similar reasons as mentioned above. In the United States, the tech giant also banned a huge number of accounts before the mid-term elections occurred and suspended many other accounts due to their offering fake news relating to state elections.

Facebook stated that the company’s services are hoped not "to be used to manipulate people." In addition, accounts and pages whose posted contents were not exactly as they claimed were also pulled down.

The company has had a plan to set up new technologies, employ more workers and continue to work with experts in the security and law enforcement fields to struggle against many kinds of inauthentic behavior.

With over 90 crores Indian citizens who have the right to vote for their promising candidates in the upcoming election, Facebook has been facing the largest rehearsal of democracy up to now. However, this will be an opportunity for Mark Zuckerberg’s company to measure how fast the problem caused by “coordinated inauthentic behavior” is spreading.