Activists or just more fake news? Facebook’s latest purge of 800 money-making political accounts criticised as ‘insanely arbitrary’

Some of the accounts had been in existence for years, with millions of followers, and professed support for conservative or liberal ideas

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AThe Facebook log-in page. The company shut down hundreds of accounts that were linked to profit-driven political messaging. Photo: AFP

Published: 12:52pm, 12 Oct 2018Updated: 12:52pm, 12 Oct 2018

Facebook said on Thursday it purged more than 800 US publishers and accounts for flooding users with politically oriented spam, reigniting accusations of political censorship and arbitrary decision-making.

In doing so, Facebook showed its increased willingness to wade into the thorny territory of policing domestic political activity. Some of the accounts had been in existence for years, had amassed millions of followers, and professed support for conservative or liberal ideas, such as one page that billed itself as “the first publication to endorse President Donald J. Trump”. Facebook’s ability to monitor manipulation of users is under an intense spotlight in the weeks ahead of the US midterm elections.

But Facebook only named five of the hundreds of pages it removed. Two of the page operators said that they were legitimate political activists, not profit driven operators of clickbait “ad farms”, as Facebook claimed in a blog post. They said they were still unsure which Facebook rules they had violated or why they had been singled out for behaviour that is standard in online organising.

Examples of one of the suspicious accounts that Facebook discovered on its platform that it says is possibly linked to Russia with the intention of influencing US politics. Photo: AP

“I would gladly abide by Facebook’s terms if I understood what they were,” said Chris Metcalf, the publisher of the left-leaning “Reasonable People Unite”, which was shut down along with eight additional Facebook pages, which he said had a total of 2.25 million followers.

“I am a legitimate political activist. I don’t have a clickbait blog. I don’t have a fake news website. And I haven’t been doing anything that all the other pages in this space aren’t doing.”