Facebook BANS hundreds of accounts from troll farm posing as African-American Trump supporters
FACEBOOK has banned hundreds of accounts from troll farm posing as African-American Donald Trump supporters.
The pro-Trump troll farm was based in Romania and shared images under Instagram handles like “BlackPeopleVoteForTrump” and Facebook posts under “We Love Our President.”
Facebook said that the account removals were based on “behavior, not content” including creating fake accounts to boost engagement.
The platforms head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said that the group’s motives were unclear, but they did not see “clear evidence of financial motivation” or “clear links to known commercial actors in this space.”
A separate troll operation was tied to media organization Epoch Media Group and featured 303 Facebook accounts, 181 pages, 44 groups and 31 Instagram accounts and was followed by over 2million people over all platforms.
The accounts were tied to digital media outlet TruthMedia and Facebook said it has been banned from its services.
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Gleicher said that the accounts posted about “ongoing US protests and conspiracy theories about who is behind them.”
However, publisher of The Epoch Times Stephen Gregory denied the company’s associated with TruthMedia.
“The Epoch Times and Epoch Media Group are not in any way linked or related with ‘Truth Media,’ nor do we have any involvement in any operation of ‘Truth Media,'” he said in an email to NBC.