Facebook shuts down 95 pro-Duterte pages as spam

Manila, Oct 23 Facebook has shut down 95 pages and 39 accounts that supported Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte for violating the the social media giant's spam and authenticity policies.

Most of these pages, including one with 4.8 million followers, were linked to support pages for Duterte, the company said in a statement on Monday.

"We're investing heavily in both people and technology to keep bad content off our services," the company said in the statement published on its official blog.

According to the statement, the pages were "encouraging people to visit low quality websites that contain little substantive content and are full of disruptive ads", reports Efe news.

A page managed by the followers of Llocos Norte Governor Imee Marcos - supporting her Senate candidacy - daughter of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, was also blocked.

Facebook further said in its statement that it had doubled the number of people working on safety and security issues on its platform in 2018 to more than 20,000 people.

"This is some of the most important work being done at Facebook. This takedown is a small step in the right direction, and we will continue working to find and remove more bad content," the statement added.

In April, Facebook had blocked several pro-Duterte pages, which were suspected of disseminating fake news.