Facebook Inc. removed 559 Pages and 251 accounts for consistently breaking the company's rules against spam and for "coordinated inauthentic behavior."

"Many were using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names and posted massive amounts of content across a network of Groups and Pages to drive traffic to their websites," Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy, and Oscar Rodriguez, product manager, said in an official company blog post.

Gleicher said some accounts were created to mislead people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate, while most used ways to make their content appear more popular on the social networking platform than it really was.

"As we get better at uncovering this kind of abuse, the people behind it — whether economically or politically motivated — will change their tactics to evade detection," the Oct. 11 blog post said. "It’s why we continue to invest heavily, including in better technology, to prevent this kind of misuse. Because people will only share on Facebook if they feel safe and trust the connections they make here."

This year, Facebook has removed myriad accounts from its flagship social networking website and its Instagram platform for similar reasons.

The move comes ahead of the midterm elections in the U.S. on Nov. 6.