Facebook is investigating thousands of fake profiles that have recently been activated to show support for social media posts by Spain's Ministry of Health and, supposedly, to improve its image. The Spanish government says it knows nothing about the matter.
The Spanish government department has said in a statement that "since Friday, April 17th, it has detected that it has been the victim of fraudulent activity by a number of apparently-false accounts, which generate massive interactions on specific posts in the official Facebook account."
The health ministry affirms that, on the very same day, it reported this issue to Facebook, referring to it as "fraudulent activity in its account", and the social media giant indicated that it would "investigate what had happened".
The press statement comes after some posts by the Spanish ministry were found to have up to 86,000 reactions, when normally they have obtained between 500 and 3,000. In addition, thousands of these responses come from profiles that are suspected bots: they have names that are uncommon in Spain, they were created just days ago - between 16th and 18th April - and they have no content beyond profile pictures of young women.
The Spanish health ministry is one of the government institutions most under the spotlight due to the country's grave coronavirus crisis. The press release concludes: "Since the beginning of the crisis, a communication team from the ministry of health has been working intensively to disseminate informative content based on videos and infographics with a public service and professional nature."