On Friday, the social media platform Facebook revealed that it has suspended or dismantled seven separate individual networks of fake pages and fake accounts, which were active in countries like Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Myanmar, Georgia, Morocco, and Ukraine.
Facebook has dismantled these fake accounts because of coordinated ‘inauthentic’ behavior. These fake accounts and fake pages were dismantled by Facebook as a part of its monthly report to coordinated inauthentic behavior.
In October, Facebook has removed up to 8,000 pages that involved deceptive campaigns around the globe. Most of these networks that have been dismantled by Facebook were seen committing deceptive practices including false political influence campaigns. These networks used fake accounts to manipulate people in both domestic and foreign regions.
Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey
A specific network of Facebook’s fake accounts and pages were handled from the countries like Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey by people who were connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. Muslim Brotherhood is an Egyptian Islamist movement, which operates multiple networks of groups across the region in the Middle East. These fake pages and accounts targeted many countries across the Middle East and also these accounts were seen as having content related to terrorism.
Georgia
In the country, Georgia, social media platform Facebook dismantled two inauthentic networks that spread political content. One of these networks was found to be handled by people who were involved in two political parties.
Myanmar and Ukraine
In Myanmar and Ukraine, Facebook dismantled some fake accounts and pages that were related to public relations firms. These Public Relations firms ran deceptive campaigns to favor the political parties in their region.
Facebook has been taking note of such deceptive or fake pages and accounts worldwide after it was accused of not developing appropriate tools soon enough to fight against propaganda operations and extremists or terrorism-related content.
Fake accounts and fake pages on Facebook have always been a big threat to global society. This move by Facebook will surely be received well from its consumers with the development of a sense of trust or belief over the social media platform. There is always a surge in the count of fake pages and accounts on Facebook, to manipulate people for their individual cause. Curbing down these accounts will increase the spread of authentic information to people.
