No official pages taken down, says Congress after Facebook removed 687 pages linked to party
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The announcement marks a rare action from Facebook against a prominent political party in a country where it has more than 300 million users, the highest in the world.
The Congress party has said that none of its official pages has been affected and it is awaiting a list of pages/accounts removed by the social media company.
"This is to clarify no official pages run by INC have been taken down. Additionally, all pages run by our verified volunteers are also unaffected. In the meantime, we are awaiting a response from Facebook to provide us with a list of all pages/accounts that they have taken down," Congress said in a tweet.
Congress spokesman Manish Tiwari had said that the "We don’t react to news reports which may just be coming in, we will have to check the veracity of the report whether there are any Facebook pages which are linked to us. Maybe the Pages are not linked to us and maybe the news report is not correct,".
Earlier, Facebook Inc said today that it was removing 687 pages and accounts linked to the Congress party, just days before voting begins in a general election, because of “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” on the social media platform.
Facebook said its investigation found that individuals used fake accounts and joined various groups to disseminate their content and increase engagement. Their posts included local news and criticism of political opponents such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).