Facebook cracking down on fake 'likes' in poll season

With politicians boosting their social media presence in the poll season using fake online followers,Facebook has started cracking down on fraudulent accounts showing suspicious high number of 'likes'.

Data from the Facebook team show that close to 52,000 pages exist for politicians and political parties in India. Of them 60 are verified pages.

"We're always focused on maintaining the integrity of our site, but we've placed an increased focus on abuse from fake accounts recently," a Facebook spokesperson said in an emailed response.

The social networking site, which has around 93 million monthly active users in India alone, has built up a combination of automated and manual systems to block accounts used for fraudulent purposes and 'Likes'.

Company officials say action is being taken against sellers of fake clicks and are helping to shut them down.

With the growing power of social media, politicians across parties have taken to the digital medium to interact with the youth through Facebook and Twitter this election season.

It is suspected that many 'Likes' and 'followers' on these platforms are from fake account holders.

Among the pages for politicians on Facebook, BJP prime minist