By Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy

Today we removed 207 Facebook Pages, 800 Facebook accounts, 546 Facebook Groups, and 208 Instagram accounts, for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook in Indonesia, misleading others about who they were and what they were doing. All of these Pages, accounts and groups were linked to the Saracen Group – an online syndicate in Indonesia.

The Saracen Group’s coordinated abuse of the platform using inauthentic accounts is a violation of our policies and we have therefore banned the entire organization from the platform.

Here’s a breakdown of what we’ve found:

Presence on Facebook and Instagram: 207 Pages, 800 accounts, and 546 groups on Facebook, as well as 208 Instagram accounts Followers: About 170,000 people 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)

We’re taking down these Pages, groups and accounts based on their behavior, not the content they were posting. In this case, the people behind this activity coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves, and that was the basis for our action.

We are constantly working to detect and stop this type of activity because we don’t want our services to be used to manipulate people. Today’s announcement is just one of the many steps we have taken to prevent bad actors from abusing our platform. We will continue to invest heavily in safety and security in order to ensure that people can continue to trust the connections they make on Facebook.