Kolkata: With politicians boosting their social media presence in the poll season using fake online followers, Facebook has started cracking down on fraudulent accounts showing suspicious high number of ‘likes’. Data from the Facebook team show that close to 52,000 pages exist for politicians and political parties in India. Of them 60 are verified pages.
“We’re always focused on maintaining the integrity of our site, but we’ve placed an increased focus on abuse from fake accounts recently,” a Facebook spokesperson said in an emailed response. The social networking site, which has around 93 mln monthly active users in India alone, has built up a combination of automated and manual systems to block accounts used for fraudulent purposes and ‘Likes’. Company officials say action is being taken against sellers of fake clicks and are helping to shut them down.
With the growing power of social media, politicians across parties have taken to the digital medium to interact with the youth through Facebook and Twitter this election season. It is suspected that many ‘Likes’ and ‘followers’ on these platforms are from fake account holders. Among the pages for politicians on Facebook, BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi is a clear winner with a massive 1.2 crore ‘Likes’ followed by Arvind Kejriwal 48 lakh, Mamata Banerjee 670,000 and Akhikesh Yadav 475,000.
According to a study by IRIS Knowledge Foundation and Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), there are 160 high impact constituencies in India which are likely to be influenced by social media during the general elections. High impact constituencies are those where the numbers of Facebook users are more than the margin of victory of the winner in the last Lok Sabha election, or where Facebook users account for over 10 per cent of the voting population.