Around 200 pro-BJP pages removed in Facebook's largest purge in India -Shivam Vij

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published Published on Apr 3, 2019   modified Modified on Apr 3, 2019
-ThePrint.in

More than the Pakistani ISI’s PR wing or the Congress’ Gujarat IT cell, the BJP has been affected by Monday’s takedown.

New Delhi:
Facebook Monday removed around 200 pro-BJP pages or groups as part of a larger purge of political pages that violate its policies, ThePrint has reliably learnt from multiple sources.

The social network announced that it had taken down various political pages run by different organisations: A digital marketing company called Silver Touch Technologies, the information technology cell of the Gujarat Congress, and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR). However, individuals running pages or groups were not named.

These organisations have been named because they were indulging in “co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour”. Of the three, Silver Touch is a Gujarat-based company known to be working closely with the Bharatiya Janata Party. Fifteen pages or groups run by the company have been removed. The most prominent of these was “The Indian Eye”, which alone had a total following of 2.6 million or 26 lakh users.

Silver Touch also runs the ‘NaMo’ app, the personal app of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The company denies running “The Indian Eye”, but Facebook said it was run by “individuals associated with Silver Touch”. The page was also known to spread fake news.

Like the ISPR and the Congress Gujarat IT Cell, Silver Touch has been named to discourage organisations from abusing the Facebook platform. Such behaviour has been described as “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” (CIB). But there’s also a whole other set of 200 pages that have been removed under a different criterion: Abuse by individuals or “civic spam”.

If CIB is like organised crime, civic spam is petty crime. Facebook’s investigations did not find organisational involvement in these pages. Multiple sources say these 200 pages were almost entirely Right-wing, pro-BJP pages.

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ThePrint.in, 2 April, 2019, https://theprint.in/politics/around-200-pro-bjp-pages-removed-in-facebooks-largest-purge-in-india/215498/


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