Facebook Shuts Dozens of Alleged Pro-Bolsonaro Accounts in Brazil

Facebook has shut 68 pages and 43 accounts linked to Brazil’s marketing group, Raposo Fernandes Associados (RFA), for violating its spam policies.

"The people behind RFA created Pages using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names, which violates our Community Standards. They then used those Pages to post massive amounts of clickbait," the statement reads.

A local newspaper, O Estado de S. Paulo, called the blocked accounts the largest network supporting Brazil’s right-wing presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who will face off against his leftist rival Fernando Haddad in the Sunday runoff.

The US social media giant argued that its decision to remove these pages was based on their behavior, rather than on the type of their content.

The newspaper said it exposed the pro-Bolsonaro network in a joint investigation with Avaaz, a US-based activist website, which claimed that the blocked pages had generated 12.5 million interactions in the past month.