Facebook has banned hundreds of pages and accounts which it says were fraudulently flooding its site with partisan political content – although they came from the US instead of being associated with Russia.

The company said it had banned 559 pages and 251 accounts that were mostly controlled by Americans, including independent news websites with millions of followers.

Facebook's cybersecurity chief Nathaniel Gleicher said most fake activity on the site now appears to come from domestic hucksters trying to capitalise on political divisions rather than state agents.

The purge is part of Facebook's ongoing campaign against what it calls "coordinated inauthentic behaviour", which in this case meants using networks of fake accounts to spread dubious content by artificially inflating its popularity.

In July the company removed 32 pages that it said bore the hallmarks of a Russian influence campaign, and in August it removed 652 more that it said were orchestrated by Iran.

But Mr Gleicher said the "bulk" of fake activity was now "motivated by money, not politics", and that most of it was coming from inside the USA.

"One common type of spam has been posts that hawk fraudulent products like fake sunglasses or weight loss 'remedies'," he said. "But a lot of the spam we see today is different.