New Delhi: Congress on Monday denied Facebook's caim of removing 687 Pages and accounts linked to the party for “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”, barely two weeks before the polling begins for the Lok Sabha elections.
Refuting the allegations the party spokesperson Manish Tewari told reporters that, “We don’t react to the news reports which may just be coming in, whether there are any Facebook pages which are linked to us. We will have to check and get back to you. We will have to check the veracity of the report. I don’t think any news organisation can claim that what they print is gospel, we have the right to check what has been published.”
Read: Facebook says removed pages linked to India's Congress party ahead of polls
In recent times, Facebook took firm steps to regulate political advertisements in order to ensure that the platform is not used for spreading misinformation when the general elections in the world’s largest democracy are around the corner.
In October 2017, it emerged that the Congress party allegedly used bots to booster Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s presence on twitter.
A close analysis of some of his tweets showed that these alleged 'bots' with a Russian, Kazakh or Indonesian characteristic were routinely RT-ing Gandhi's tweets. Further scrutiny of these Twitter accounts showed that the follower list was usually under 10 users and retweets comprised of random topics from across the world and those of Rahul Gandhi. Moreover, the content of these Twitter timelines comprised merely of retweets and a lack of tweets which could be categorised as an original thought.
