Facebook has alleged that one of south-east Asia’s biggest telecoms providers used tactics typical of Russian trolls to discredit rivals, in one of the first takedowns of so-called commercial disinformation from its platform.
The world’s largest social media platform said on Wednesday that it had banned a network of two dozen fake pages and accounts linked to two telecoms providers — Vietnam’s Viettel and Myanmar’s Mytel — marking the first time Facebook has taken action against businesses for directly using disinformation against competitors.
According to Facebook, those behind the pages created what appeared to be an “independent telecoms news hub”, posing as customers critical of the companies’ telecoms rivals, and spreading fake news of alleged business failures, market exits and fraudulent activity at those rivals.
Source: Facebook accuses telecoms groups of disinformation tactics | Financial Times