A total of 95 pages and 39 accounts on Facebook in the Philippines were removed by the social networking giant in an announcement made early this week. The advisory shared that this was made in an effort to continue the protection of services offered by the well-known global social media platform from abuse and wrongdoing. As such, the announcement noted that the said Pages and accounts were removed for “violating our spam and authenticity policies by encouraging people to visit low quality websites that contain little substantive content and are full of disruptive ads.”
The announcement noted that in keeping with its community standards, several removed pages were pro-Duterte such as Duterte Media, Duterte sa Pagbabago BUKAS, DDS, Duterte Phenomenon, DU30 Trending News. While others were indirectly connected to the present administration such as Hot Babes, News Media Trends, Bossing Vic, Pilipinas Daily News, Like and Win, and Manang Imee, Karlo ang Probinsiyano, but were all sharing links to the “same advertising click farms off Facebook”. Interestingly enough, one of the 95 Pages noted had a follower base that reached 4.8 million.
It furthered:
We don’t want this kind of behavior on Facebook — and we’re investing heavily in both people and technology to keep bad content off our services. We have more than doubled the number of people working on safety and security this year and now have more than 20,000 people around the world. We use reports from our community and technology like machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect bad behavior and take action more quickly.
This is some of the most important work being done at Facebook. This takedown is a small step in the right direction, and we will continue working to find and remove more bad content.
Facebook notes that they are continuing to monitor abusive behavior associated with Facebook pages from spamming and other social engineering tactics that are breaking its community standards and rules.