Facebook cleans out fake accounts from Thailand, Russia, Ukraine, Honduras
The social network removed hundreds of accounts for "coordinated inauthentic behavior."
- Carrie has lived on both coasts and can definitively say that Chesapeake Bay blue crabs are the best.
This week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook has a responsibility to protect users.
Facebook removed nearly 300 accounts, along with multiple pages, groups and Instagram accounts, as part of its latest purge of "coordinated inauthentic behavior." The social network on Thursday said the accounts stemmed from four unconnected campaigns originating in Thailand, Russia, Ukraine and Honduras.
In total, 294 accounts, 1,509 pages and 32 groups were removed in the past week. Facebook said it didn't find any links between the campaigns, but that they all "created networks of accounts to mislead others about who they were and what they were doing." The campaigns had a collective following of more than 274,000 accounts.
The ousting comes as Facebook on Wednesday agreed to pay $5 billion to the Federal Trade Commission and $100 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission over the social network's privacy mishaps. The settlements stem from probes into whether Facebook should have done more to prevent Cambridge Analytica from siphoning off the data of up to 87 million users.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement Wednesday that the social network would make "major structural changes" to how it builds products and conducts business.
"We have a responsibility to protect people's privacy," Zuckerberg wrote. "We already work hard to live up to this responsibility, but now we're going to set a completely new standard for our industry."
Watch our video on how to delete or disable your Facebook account: We walk you step-by-step on saving your data and removing your account.