Facebook on Friday said it has banned Twinmark Media Enterprises, a Philippine digital marketing group, and all its subsidiaries for violating the social media platform’s misrepresentation and spam policies.
“This organisation has repeatedly violated our misrepresentation and spam policies – including through coordinated inauthentic behaviour, the use of fake accounts, leading people to ad farms, and selling access to Facebook Pages to artificially increase distribution and generate profit,” Facebook said in a statement.
As part of the ban, 220 Facebook pages, 73 Facebook accounts and 29 Instagram accounts linked to the company have been removed.
Facebook reiterated that the decision to ban the organisation was based only on the behaviour of these actors “who repeatedly violated our misrepresentation and spam policies, rather than on the type of content they were posting”.
Facebook’s Cybersecurity Policy chief Nathaniel Gleicher said the investigation into Twinmark’s behaviour started in November 2018, the Inquirer reported. The probe started after the social media platform found that the company was selling admin rights to Facebook Pages it had created in order to increase distribution and to generate profit, which is in violation of Facebook’s spam policy.
Facebook last year said it had either suspended or removed hundreds of accounts linked to Iran or Russia that were misleading, and displayed inauthentic or “manipulating behaviour”.
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