In efforts to clean up the popular social network and its reputation, Facebook has been removing dubious and what it terms coordinated inauthentic behaviour pages, groups and accounts from its platform. The company released a statement that it has just removed 207 Facebook Pages, 800 Facebook accounts, 546 Facebook Groups, and 208 Instagram accounts, from its Indonesian site.

According to Facebook all this Pages, accounts and groups were linked to the Saracen Group – an online syndicate in Indonesia which is know to spread hoax news and was involved in numerous high profile cases. What’s surprising is why Facebook took this long to react?

Each of the pages taken down had average followers of about 170,000 people who followed at least one of these Facebook Pages, and more than 65,000 followed at least one of these Instagram accounts

Examples of Pages and Groups removed as part of this network:

• Permadi Arya (Page)
• Kata Warga (Page)
• Darknet ID (Page)
• berita hari ini (Group)
• ac milan indo (Group)

Facebook claimed that it was taking down these Pages based on their behavior and not the content they were posting. In some cases, the people behind the activity coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves.

However, the social platform does not police what goes on within its pages and often not only acts after human rights group call out on the bad activity, fake news and even atrocities are spread in the platform. Late last year, it took down similar pages in Myanmar belonging to agents believed to be behind spreading false news that incited hatred about the Rohingya’s leading to mass massacre’s of the ethnic group. This releases claiming of acting up and removing bad behaviour on its platform are usually too late too little, as most often than not these culprits have already caused irreversible damage.