Lelo Welcomes FB's Decision to Remove 'False, Anti-Western Content'

Public movement Lelo welcomes Facebook's decision to remove false, “anti-Western and anti-state propaganda pages, groups and accounts from its platform.”

"Mamuka Khazaradze was the first who unmasked the offenders behind the cyberattack on TBC Bank and identified the address of the so-called troll factory. Unfortunately, then the Minister of Internal Affairs Giorgi Gakharia cover-up the government-funded criminal group and the case is still uninvestigated. We hope that the operation, carried out by Facebook, is the first step forward defeating the systemic lying and the Georgian society will be involved in this fight, cleaning of the Georgian media space will be continued and we will eventually defeat the hidden enemy, which is washing the brain of people and which are funded from the state budget. Lelo will continue to fight against anti-state propaganda and for a fair information field,” the public movement said in a statement.

Facebook has removed 39 accounts, 344 pages and 13 groups for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” in Georgia targeting domestic audiences. 

In a statement released on December 20, Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Facebook’s Security Policy, explained that the people behind this activity used fake accounts to increase engagement on their content and manage pages.

"These pages posed as news organizations and impersonated political parties, public figures, activist groups, and media entities”, Gleicher said.

"The page admins and account owners typically posted about domestic news and political issues such as elections, government policies, public officials, criticism of the opposition and local activist organizations”, he added.

Gleicher said that the Facebook team has identified these accounts through their investigation into suspected coordinated inauthentic behavior in the region and their investigation benefited from public reporting.

"Although the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation linked this activity to Panda, an advertising agency in Georgia, and the Georgian Dream-led government", he said.

He further noted that the Facebook team is “constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity” because they don’t want their services to be used to manipulate people.

By Ana Dumbadze 

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