Palace shrugs off Facebook purge of pro-Duterte pages

Malacañang on Tuesday shrugged off Facebook's decision to take down pages supportive of President Rodrigo Duterte due to spam content and alleged violation of authenticity policies.

At a press briefing, presidential spokesperson Salvador Panelo said the purge does not speak about the profile of the President's supporters.

"Not necessarily. Facebook has its rules and regulations, and if they are implementing that, then that's their own [decision]," Panelo said when asked if the removal of the pro-Duterte pages is reflective of the kind of supporters the President has.

Panelo said the supporters of the President still have enough social media platforms to express their support outside of Facebook.

"If the concerns is that there are no more avenues, we have more avenues out there like Twitter, Instagram, and many others where advocates can express support of this administration," he said.

Among the pro-Duterte pages purged by Facebook were Duterte Media, Duterte sa Pagbabago Bukas, DDS, Duterte Phenomenon and DU30 Trending News.

"As part of our ongoing efforts to protect our services from abuse, we have removed a network of 95 Pages and 39 accounts on Facebook in the Philippines for violating our spam and authenticity policies by encouraging people to visit low quality websites that contain little substantive content and are full of disruptive ads," Facebook said in a statement.

"We don't want this kind of behavior on Facebook — and we’re investing heavily in both people and technology to keep bad content off our services. This is some of the most important work being done at Facebook. This takedown is a small step in the right direction, and we will continue working to find and remove more bad content,” it added. —KBK, GMA News