Madrid: In its bid to tackle fake news and coordinated campaign by fanning outrageous news and images, Facebook has cracked down on pages and groups spreading far-right content to over 1.7 million people in Spain. This action has come amidst the election season in Spain. The country goes for general elections on April 28 and local elections on May 26.
The findings were provided by the campaign group Avaaz which made a presentation to Facebook and acting upon the same, the contents were taken down.
This comes days after Facebook had undertaken a similar exercise in India whereby it had taken down around accounts and pages, linked to the social media cell of the Congress and the Bharatiya Janta Party, for “inauthentic behaviour”.
On Wednesday, the MPs in England condemned Facebook, Google and Twitter as these social media handles refused to report users to law enforcement authorities when they take down criminal posts.
Facebook has said that the Spanish pages are not being taken down because of their content but for “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”. Some of these pages had more than thousands of followers.
Spain has winessed the rise of Vox, a far-right political outfit, in the last six months when it won 12 seats in a regional election and it is expected to make a big leap in the upcoming elections.
