San Francisco sources reported that many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a network of Groups and Pages to drive traffic to their websites, the social networking platform said late on Thursday. "Many used the same techniques to make their content appear more popular on Facebook than it really was.
Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy at Facebook, said in a statement “Others were ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate". Meanwhile the action is part of Facebook's new policy against Pages, Groups and accounts created to stir up political debate including in the US, the Middle East, Russia and the UK. Topics like natural disasters or celebrity gossip have been popular ways to generate click bait.
As per report Facebook has also disabled accounts operated by a Russian company called SocialDataHub that the social network says scraped user data from its platform. A Facebook spokesperson was quoted as saying "As part of our efforts to protect people's security, we have recently removed Social Data Hub (SDH), a Russian linked social media firm, because they were scraping people's information". The spokesperson added. In the biggest-ever security breach after Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has admitted that hackers broke into nearly 50 million users' accounts by stealing their "access tokens" or digital keys.
