With the U.S. midterm elections looming, Facebook Inc. has removed hundreds of pages related to political spamming and what the company calls “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

In a blog post, Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, and product manager Oscar Rodriguez, said the pages weren’t taken down for their content per se, but because they violated Facebook’s terms of service.

The company said 559 Pages and 251 accounts had consistently stepped over the line regarding the spread of political content that was not posted for any kind of legitimate debate. Those pages were in fact just building audiences, often using clickbait as the tease.

“Many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a network of Groups and Pages to drive traffic to their websites,” said Facebook. “Many used the same techniques to make their content appear more popular on Facebook than it really was. Others were ad farms using Facebook to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate.”

Facebook added that such tactics are not uncommon and are sometimes just a legitimate way of fundraising, but in that case the pages are open about whom they are and what they are doing. In the case of the removed political pages, the only objective was making money or driving traffic, not politics, said Facebook.

It’s reported that some dubious pages, such as “Right Wing News” (pictured) were part of the cull, but Facebook maintained that the removal was not content-based. That page – with 3 million followers no less – and others were removed because of that behavior.

“As we get better at uncovering this kind of abuse, the people behind it — whether economically or politically motivated — will change their tactics to evade detection,” said the company. “It’s why we continue to invest heavily, including in better technology, to prevent this kind of misuse.”

That said, Edward Lynn, editor-in-chief of Reverb Press, took umbrage when his page was removed, stating the content was definitely authentic. “We are a legitimate news publisher,” he told The Guardian. “We are not fake news. We are not misinformation. We are not foreign. We are simply a small independent news publication trying to grow.”

Image: Right Wing News