Over 30 Facebook pages being run from Macedonia have been removed by Facebook in the past two months.

BuzzFeed News Two false posts from Facebook pages that the social network removed due to terms-of-service violations.

The town of Veles, Macedonia, achieved international fame last fall after a BuzzFeed News story reported on a large cluster of pro-Trump websites that often published fake news and that were being run by teenagers and young men. Soon camera crews from major media outlets such as Britain’s Channel 4, ABC’s Nightline, as well as reporters from Wired magazine and NBC News arrived to write about the “fake-news teens.” But now panic has set in for some of the young publishers of Veles. Over the past two months, more than 30 Facebook pages they use to drive traffic to their websites have been removed due to what the social network said were multiple terms-of-service violations. Most of the killed pages were focused on US politics, but several publishers told BuzzFeed News they also lost large and lucrative pages about horses, motorcycles, muscle cars, and snowmobiles. “They live from that [sic] fan pages,” wrote one Macedonian who reached out on behalf of several friends who lost their pages. “Now they got nothing.” (Like the three other Macedonian publishers who spoke to BuzzFeed News, he asked that his name not be used in order to prevent his pages and websites from suffering additional consequences from Facebook.) “I'm in a very inappropriate situation, after spending a huge amount of money on Facebook for promoting articles and Page likes,” said a Macedonian publisher who lost a page with more than 1.3 million fans. “In end all have got is unpublished page.” Another publisher estimated he spent roughly $100,000 on Facebook ads over the years to attract new fans for his four pages, which cumulatively had over 1.5 million likes. He and others assumed that being allowed to pay for Facebook ads for their pages meant they were operating in the clear. A Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that a publisher who buys ads to promote posts or a page is not immune from the rules of the platform. The spokesperson also said there is not a specific effort to target Macedonian publishers. “These instances are part of our ongoing, global effort to detect and stop spam activity on our platform, and not isolated to Macedonia,” they said. The removal of roughly three dozen pages owned by Macedonian publishers is a result of Facebook’s push to rid its platform of spammers, fake news publishers, and others who violate its terms of service. But it’s also a reminder that no one really “owns” a Facebook page, in spite of how much money they might spend growing it. And while Facebook did not specifically target Macedonian publishers, the removals may have been in part a result of a strategy executed by a small group of American publishers who told BuzzFeed News they grew tired of having their content stolen by Macedonians. “Macedonians refused to stop stealing my material,” said Christopher Blair, who goes by the online handle Busta Troll and runs TheLastLineOfDefense.org, which frequently saw its stories copied word for word by multiple sites run out of Macedonia. “My friends and I handled it. Most lost their pages, some lost their blogs.”

Rašo / Via commons.wikimedia.org Veles, Macedonia

The automated message from Facebook received by some Macedonians after their pages were removed informed them, “Your Page has been unpublished for causing people to like or engage with it unintentionally in a misleading way.” BuzzFeed News has documented the fake news, fake accounts, and other dubious approaches used by some US political pages run by Macedonians. But the publishers who spoke to BuzzFeed News insisted they were following Facebook’s rules on at least some of the removed pages. One said he personally wrote all of the content on his website about muscle cars and was in line with Facebook’s terms of service. “All the way I was trying to be correct with all the posts ... I’m not just a kid trying to get some instant money posting everything,” he said, acknowledging that some in Macedonia steal content and publish false information. One publisher who recently lost five Facebook pages, two of which were about US politics, told BuzzFeed News he may have had some questionable content on his political pages but that his muscle car pages were clean. “On my political [page] maybe there were some fake news, but you have to understand us, we are not doing that because we are [interested] in the politics — only for the money,” he said. The Facebook spokesperson said the topic of a page is not a factor in its review process. “We don’t make our policy decisions about spam based on the topic of Pages. If a Page is in violation of Facebook policies, it’s in violation — no matter the topic.” Though the page removals largely happened in May and June, the seeds for the Macedonian crackdown were planted months ago. Thousands of miles away in rural Maine, Blair and some of his collaborators on websites and Facebook pages were executing a simple strategy aimed at shutting down Macedonian publishers. They repeatedly reported Macedonian-run pages to Facebook for stealing content. As previously reported by BuzzFeed News, many Macedonian-run politics websites made a habit of copying and pasting any new articles published on Blair's site, which is filled with fake articles he says are meant to troll American conservatives.

America's Last Line Of Defense / Via thelastlineofdefense.org