The Washington Post reported Facebook has “purged over 800 accounts and pages pushing political messages for profit.”

Angelo Carusone, President of Media Matters released the following statement:

Early voting is already happening in some states, and Election Day is a few weeks away, so it’s especially inexcusable that Facebook is only now deleting political disinformation pages. Facebook has long been aware of the presence and activities of these pages but did nothing until the company sensed a potential public relations disaster as reporters started working on stories about right-wing networks intentionally promoting misinformation through their operation of these pages.

So, while it’s a good thing that Facebook is finally taking this action, it’s yet another example that Facebook is not prepared to proactively meet the challenges of abuse and misinformation on its platform; instead, the platform does the bare minimum to respond to the latest PR crisis.

Previously:

How the Facebook right-wing propaganda machine works

Facebook is fueling far-right extremism -- and profiting off of it

Facebook has permitted political ads featuring fake news, bigotry, and conspiracy theories

Under Facebook’s new algorithm, conservative meme pages are outperforming all political news pages