As a result, the companyвЂ™s Facebook engagement increased by as much as 5 times in just a year.ДЄt its peak, the company employed around 50 to 60 people. Around 2016, the company shifted its focus to politics to take advantage of the popularity of President Rodrigo Duterte. Twinmark Media was established by three brothers: Fernando, Ken and Mark Anthony Hicban. Some of the websites and brands owned by TMMI include Trending News Portal (TNP), HealthyDigest, Kikay Department, TechieTalk, and Wonderer. TMMI claims that its websites have over 1 billion engagements per month.

Founded in 2014, the company owns and manages several websites in вЂњdifferent market niches catering to the interests of its many followers and readers.вЂќ It fit nicely into CEO Mark ZuckerbergвЂ™s pledge just a year earlier to make Facebook its usersвЂ™ personal newspaper. (TMMI) is the company behind the popular viral news website Trending News Portal. When Facebook launched trending in 2014 as a list of headlines to the side of the main news feed, it was a straightforward move to steal users from Twitter by giving them a quick look at the most popular news of the moment. One example of Twinmark MediaвЂ™s violations is changing the names of its pages after building up a large following, which is a violation of FacebookвЂ™s page policies as it misleads the pageвЂ™s followers. WeвЂ™re not just removing the violating behavior, we are removing the entire organization,вЂќ Gleicher added. вЂњThis is one of the most significant takedowns in the world. Gleicher said that Facebook is continuously working to stop abuse of its platform, and that the people behind this abuse will continue to вЂњevolve their tactics.вЂќ He reiterated that Twinmark Media will not be allowed to reestablish its presence in Facebook. FacebookвЂ™s cybersecurity team then took a deeper look at the users involved and the pages and accounts associated with them, ultimately discovering a massive network of pages and accounts engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior, the use of fake accounts, leading people to ad farms, and selling admin access to pages.

The investigation of Twinmark MediaвЂ™s activities started when Facebook learned that the company was selling admin rights to its Facebook pages.

Trending Topics Philippines Facebook page, one of the many pages deleted during the purge of Twinmark MediaвЂ™s properties. Nathaniel Gleicher, FacebookвЂ™s head of cybersecurity policy, said that the social media networkвЂ™s decision to ban Twinmark Media is вЂњbased on the behavior of these actors who repeatedly violated our misrepresentation and spam policies, rather than on the type of content they were posting.вЂќ This means that accusations of being purveyors of вЂњfake newsвЂќ had nothing to do with the organizationвЂ™s removal from Facebook. Filipino Channel Online (10.4 million followers)ДЄll in all, there were about 43 million Facebook accounts that followed at least one of the 220 deleted pages.These are the Facebook pages that were removed as part of the purge:

Trending news on facebook