Images on the now-deleted page bear a physical similarity to the photos released by French media of the Kouachi brothers. The Facebook account focuses heavily on two things — workouts at the gym and guns. French media outlets have reported that the brothers previously trained as gym instructors, and their familiarity with guns was evident in the deadly expertise with which they handled their weapons during the attack.

Two spokespeople for Facebook told BuzzFeed News that a Facebook page appearing to belong to Said Kouachi, one of the men wanted in the Charlie Hebdo attacks, was only on the website for 12 hours and was deleted early Thursday morning.

BuzzFeed News had reached out to Facebook to find out why the page had been deleted. Spokesperson Andrew Sauvall said the page violated their policy of supporting terrorist groups. He also said BuzzFeed News's post was "wrong" and asked for its deletion.

Sauvall said that the administrators of Facebook pages can manipulate the "start info" to reflect a time other than the time that the account was created on the website — to reflect a company's founding, for example.

The information section of the page — a community page, not a personal one — stated that it was created on April 19, 2014, but Souvall told BuzzFeed News it was created Wednesday afternoon and deleted by Facebook on Thursday morning.

One of the photos, seemingly uploaded in May 2014, featured a man holding a gun, with the caption "le frero" — French slang for "the brother." The image appeared to resemble that of Cherif Kouachi.

When BuzzFeed News later asked about the discrepancies between the timestamps and Facebook's timeline, Sauvall said that the posts and photos on the page had been "backdated."

Facebook's Timeline feature, he said, allows administrators to change the date of items on their page. This feature is intended for listing dates of significance. The only indication that a post or photo has been changed is a small clock symbol that appears next to the modified date.

Sauvall initially said that this feature was only available on pages, as opposed to personal profiles, but by this time BuzzFeed News editors had been able to change the dates on images and posts on their personal profiles. Sauvall was surprised to hear that this was the case and referred BuzzFeed News to another spokesperson.

Johnny Thaw, another Facebook spokesperson, confirmed that backdating of posts and images was available for personal timelines as well as pages. When the previous interaction with Sauvall was relayed, Thaw said that his colleague "was mistaken" about how the feature worked.