MANILA – Over 200 pages and accounts that were organized by President Rodrigo Duterte’s social media manager Nic Gabunada during the 2016 campaign have been taken down by Facebook.
Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy Nathaniel Gleicher said 67 Facebook pages, 68 accounts, 40 groups, and 25 Instagram accounts were taken down from the social media platform.
“Our investigation could confirm that this was a cluster of coordinated behavior that is linked to a network organized by (Gabunada),” Gleicher said. “We have removed about 200 pages and groups for engaging in coordinated and inauthentic behavior.”
He added: “What we saw is this cluster of pages groups…a combination of authentic and fake accounts that were basically being used to drive messaging on behalf of, and related to, local [election] candidates.”
Gleicher added that around 3.6 million Facebook accounts followed one or more of the banned pages, and about 1.8 million accounts joined at least one of the groups, while there were 5,300 accounts that followed one or more of the Instagram accounts.
“The pages frequently posted about local and political news, including topics like the upcoming elections, candidate updates and views, alleged misconduct of political opponents, and controversial events that were purported to occur during previous administrations,” he said.
Gleicher added: “Although the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities, our investigation found that this activity was linked to a network organized by Nic Gabunada.”
Meanwhile, Gabunada said he was surprised with the “unfortunate” Facebook crackdown as he claimed that was just among the people who share content and invited to join certain groups, and also said he plans to appeal the takedowns.
“I don’t deny that I am a member of several groups and I was asked by people to be analyst or editor or administrator of several pages…and those pages are really pro-Duterte pages and pro-Duterte groups,” Gabunada said.
He added: “I have a feeling that I was singled out whereas the pro-opposition pages were not. There are more irresponsible pages like Changescamming, Pinoy Ako Blog and Now You Know, and a lot of other pages that are anti-Duterte [which] can be very vicious also.”
The takedown follows similar Facebook action in January when the company took down Twinmark Enterprises for similar violations on Facebook’s policies on what it calls coordinated inauthentic behavior./PN
