By Jeff Horwitz 

Through much of the tumultuous weekend, a popular video on Facebook Live purported to show real-time footage of police officers kneeling on the back of a black man's head.

"They want a peaceful protest in Minneapolis but the police are cowards in Minnesota PERIOD!!!" the post accompanying the video read.

One hitch: The footage was taken from an arrest in 2018.

The page that posted the video, gathering 1.6 million views, was operated out of Pakistan and was among a group of foreign-run Facebook pages that appeared to be spreading misleading or inflammatory videos about the protests using Facebook's live-video features. The most popular of the posts gained significantly more traffic than the most-watched Facebook content from Fox News or CNN.

Facebook Inc. took down some of the pages after The Wall Street Journal flagged them to the company. A company spokeswoman said, "Our teams have been working around the clock to find and remove violating activity since the protests started."

Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, said the pages the company removed were engaging in spam-like activity, in violation of Facebook's rules, and some appeared to be administered by dummy accounts.

The page removals illustrate the struggle social-media platforms are having to find the right balance between allowing users to communicate freely about the protests while also controlling those who post misinformation or otherwise exploit the unrest.

Seeking to direct users toward legitimate information, Mr. Gleicher said, Facebook has boosted known and reliable sources of information in its search results and deployed automated screening tools and limits on dissemination in some instances. But Mr. Gleicher said the platform was wary of overly restricting content about the protests.

"In a situation like this, there is often really valuable and important information that comes from unknown voices very quickly," he said. "Some of the coverage of the violence over the last few nights is really scary stuff -- but it's also really important that people see it."

TikTok on Friday apologized after users questioned why content posted under hashtags such as "Black Lives Matter" and " George Floyd" didn't appear to be gaining traction on the platform, one of the most widely used social apps among teenagers in the U.S.

In a later post on its official Twitter account, the video-sharing app said that a technical error meant the view counts of several tags weren't displayed, and that it wasn't limited to protest-related topics. TikTok said it stood with the black community and was "committed to fostering a space where everyone is seen and heard."

The issue of foreign actors gaming the platform is a sensitive topic for Facebook: Russian operatives posted inflammatory content about social protests in the U.S. ahead of the 2016 election as part of an effort to sow division, according to an investigation by former special counsel Robert Mueller. Facebook has pledged to fight foreign interference this election cycle.

Mr. Gleicher said there was no indication that the foreign accounts were seeking to influence the course of the protests. The likely goal, he said, was simply to build an audience for a page that could be later used to send spam. Other accounts rebroadcasting protest or riot footage with titles identical to the foreign pages appeared to be run by Americans, he said.

Mr. Gleicher said that streaming prerecorded video as "Facebook Live" content didn't automatically violate the platform's policies, though he said the company seeks to stop efforts to mislead people about the timing and circumstances when a video was taken.

"It's a technique for which there are many legitimate uses," he said of rebroadcasting footage as "live," noting that it was used frequently by computer gamers and could be beneficial to users who wish to broadcast something live but who don't have immediate internet access.

Some researchers said it was concerning that Facebook accounts cloaking recycled content within the drama of real-time events had managed to garner such attention.

"Facebook's saying 'we built a tool to show people what's going on in the world live at any given time' -- but that's not what it's showing," said Renee DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, who looked at the accounts at the Journal's request. "There are issues with that feature that need to be rectified."

The video of the 2018 arrest, which was taken in the Twin Cities suburb of Roseville, Minn., and is under 20 minutes long, was looped for more than six hours on Facebook Live and viewed more than 1.6 million times on just one of the accounts.

Other protest-related live streams from the pages run out of Pakistan and Botswana had garnered as many as 20 million views per video before Facebook shut them down over the weekend. Posts on Facebook Live from Fox News or CNN rarely break a million views.

The provenance of the pages was listed in the transparency section as required by Facebook, but that requires casual browsers to seek out who is behind the posts.

"The situation is getting really worse, Serious riots going on right now, " the pages repeatedly said. But clones of the Pakistani page titled "USA Latest 24/7" and "USA News Updates" remained live on Monday, gathering tens of thousands of views per hour with identical posts and video titles. Facebook also chose to leave up a number of accounts that made identical posts but which hailed from the U.S. after the company determined they weren't misleading.

Ms. DiResta said the previous activity of the accounts broadcasting the looped live footage appeared consistent with spam-based audience-building efforts. Before turning their focus to riot-related content, the pages had posted animal videos, clips from President Trump news conferences and Tom and Jerry cartoons.

"This seemed like they were grabbing old, sensational stuff that people would want to share," said Ms. DiResta.

The pages grew rapidly after links to them were shared within groups devoted to the far-right conspiracy theory known as Q-Anon and by pages associated with the populist, economic justice-focused Yellow Vest movement in France. Those are Facebook communities "that share highly emotional or inflammatory content and have a lot of interest in the relationships between people and power," Ms. DiResta said.

Liza Lin contributed to this article.

Write to Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 02, 2020 13:38 ET (17:38 GMT)