'Facebook's page purge hurt BJP more than Congress'
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A bulk of the 700-plus Indian political pages recently removed by Facebook may have belonged to the Congress but it's the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that copped a bigger hit, Quartz India reported on Tuesday.
On Monday, the social media giant said it had removed 687 pages and accounts linked to India’s main opposition party because of “coordinated inauthentic behaviour”. On the other hand, Facebook said, only 15 accounts linked to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi were taken down.
QZ, citing various media reports, also claimed that the actual number of pro-BJP pages removed by Facebook could be in excess of 200, even if the number was not mentioned by the website itself in its announcement on Monday.
The publication points out that the pro-BJP pages removed by Facebook, even if fewer in number, were far more established and thus had a much bigger reach than Congress'.
QZ compared the Congress and BJP's purged pages, saying that the former's 687 accounts merely had 206,000 followers in total, whereas the latter's 15 were followed by a massive 2.6 million users.
It further says that $70,000 had been spent on the 15 pro-BJP pages, whereas the 687 others had only seen a total expenditure of $39,000.
“The pro-BJP campaign was big and long-lasting. It picked up over 2 million followers, and managed to stay below the radar for years,” QZ India quoted Ben Nimmo, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFR Lab), as saying.
In contrast, the Congress campaign that was removed, he added, “was smaller, and its pages didn’t have so much impact individually. It looks like they were trying to build up impact by running lots of micro-pages, rather than one big one.”
The publication adds that the pro-BJP pages were all purportedly owned by Silver Touch — an IT firm that had links with Modi and even developed the Indian prime minister's official app: NaMo.
While the BJP denies that it has ties with Silver Touch or the removed pages, QZ says that Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy had established the firm's link with Modi's app.
