Facebook takes down thousands of accounts ahead of India's elections

April 1 (UPI) -- Facebook on Monday removed 1,126 pages and accounts connected to India's opposition party ahead of elections for violating its misinformation policies.

Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, said in a company blog post that it removed the content and accounts for violating the social media platform's policies on coordinated inauthentic behavior or spam.

Gleicher said Facebook made four separate "take-downs" in removing the content because each appeared to be distinct and unconnected.

Facebook removed 103 pages, groups and accounts that originated from Pakistan and 687 Facebook pages and accounts connected with an IT cell of the Indian National Congress. It removed another 15 Facebook pages, groups and accounts associated with the Indian IT firm Silver Touch.

The last 321 pages and accounts removed did not appear to represent a single or coordinated operation, but were "multiple sets of pages and accounts that behaved similarly and violated our policies."

The Indian National Congress said none of the party's "official" sites have been affected by Facebook's actions.

"This is to clarify no official pages run by INC have been taken down," the INC tweeted. "Additionally, all pages run by our verified volunteers are also unaffected. In the mean time, we are awaiting a response from Facebook to provide us a list of all pages/accounts that they have taken down."

The moves comes ahead of the April 11 election in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party appears to be facing a stronger than expected challenge from the INC.

Modi's party must win the majority of the 543 seats at stake in its lower house of Parliament to assure he will keep his seat.

Facebook announced Sunday that it was adding a tool that will explain why users are seeing certain information on its news feeds. Ramya Sethuraman, Facebook's product manager, said in a blog post that the new "Why am I seeing this post?" will help users understand and better control what they see from friends, pages and groups.

"During our research on 'Why am I seeing this post?,' people told us that transparency into News Feed algorithms wasn't enough without corresponding controls," Sethuraman said. "People wanted to be able to take action, so we've made it easy to manage what you see in News Feed right from this feature.

"People's feedback also helped us determine what specific information would be most valuable to highlight," he said.