Facebook to Remove Pages and Groups Affiliated With Bad Actors

Facebook may now remove pages that are affiliated with bad actors, even if the page has done nothing wrong.

The company says this change is being made to prevent people from continuing to engage in the malicious activity through other existing pages.

“… we are updating our recidivism policy to better prevent those who have had Pages removed for violating our Community Standards from using duplicate Pages to continue the same activity.”

Previously, people who had pages removed for violating Facebook’s policies were prohibited from creating new pages.

There were no measures in place to stop a person from continuing their behavior through existing pages.

Now, when a person has a Facebook page removed due to policy violations, existing pages they manage may also be removed.

Facebook explains how it plans to enforce this policy:

“To enforce this updated policy, we’ll look at a broad set of information, including whether the Page has the same people administering it, or has a similar name, to one we’re removing.”

Facebook will begin enforcing this change in the coming weeks.

In addition to this policy update, Facebook is also improving its communication with pages that have had content removed.

New “Page Quality” Tab

When Facebook removes content from a page or reduces the distribution of certain content, admins can learn why in the new Page Quality tab.

The tab includes two sections:

  • Content we recently removed for violating Community Standards.
  • Content recently rated “False,” “Mixture” or “False Headline” by third-party fact-checkers.

Page managers will be able to let Facebook know if an incorrect decision was made.

Facebook notes that while this tab provides greater insight, it is not all-encompassing.

For example, it will not show information about content removals for things like spam, clickbait, or IP violations.

This tab has started rolling out to pages as of today.

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