As Facebook announced on Monday that it has removed 687 spam Facebook pages and accounts connected to individuals associated with the Congress's IT cell, the party said that none of its official pages have been affected and it was awaiting a list of pages/accounts removed from the social media company.

"This is to clarify no official pages run by INC have been taken down. Additionally, all pages run by our verified volunteers are also unaffected. In the mean time, we are awaiting a response from Facebook to provide us a list of all pages/accounts that they have taken down," Congress said in a tweet.

Earlier Congress spokesman Manish Tiwari had said that the party needs to check the veracity of these pages/accounts, "whether the Facebook pages are linked to us".

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"Maybe the Pages are not linked to us and maybe the news report is not correct," he said.

Facebook said that spam Facebook Pages and accounts connected to individuals associated with the Congress Party's IT cell had spent around Rs 27 lakh for ads on Facebook and that the first ad ran in August 2014 and the most recent ad ran in March 2019. (IANS)