As a Romanian what seems to happen is that a large group of supporters of the ruling party were coordinated in reporting the protests-related posts. I think facebook could easily implement an algorithm to detect reporting rings and actually suspending their member's accounts. Just like reddit is doing with the upvoting rings.
Why don't you think they have one? Let's take a second and think about how awful Facebook would be right now if they didn't have the protections they have in place already.
Taking an isolated incident of community reporting taking down some posts and accounts doesn't show in any way that they don't have protections against bot rings. What if it's legitimate users who have a vendetta against the protesters? Obviously, that doesn't make the end result OK, but that wouldn't be some weird evidence of technical neglect by Facebook.
That sure was the case in Ukraine during the was and it's going on on now with Saakashvili. Lots of people just tag everything as porno and user who posted this goes to ban.
When you are trying to appeal, it obviously goes to somebody who should know the language post was written and it happens to be some Russian, who also flags it.
I doubt that this is an isolated incident. I've directly seen a few cases when content that was unpopular with a large group was removed for ridiculously false reasons and heard of various FB groups trolling each other by getting each other banned.
> Isn't mass reporting done by people a form of activism. Don't know why you want to diferentiate, activism doesn't have to be "good".
Any kind of "mass reporting" should be blocked, regardless of the motivation. The only question when evaluating a report should be is it of a valid guideline violation or not.
The core problem here seems to be that Facebook doesn't have a human in the loop to filter the bad reports from good. Maybe they do have a human in the loop, but that human isn't trustworthy. In any case, their system clearly needs more work.
When content reported by a group of people acting in concert is manually reviewed (one can dream, right?) and it turns out that it didn't violate the rules on what kind of content can be posted, the group of people is actually a reporting ring, and reports by them should correspondingly be given lower weight.
These people are acting in concert to deny some other citizens what should be a basic right: the right of free speech. There are things that shouldn't be possible to be enabled by popular vote: for example it shouldn't be possible to take the life of a law abiding citizen based on how many people antipathize him. Or to silence one for that matter.
I think that voting rings should in fact be legitimate (because they show that a piece of content is popular within a certain group of people, which is exactly the purpose of upvoting functionality), while reporting rings that obstruct some individuals liberties should be actively banned.
You don't have a right to post whatever you want on Facebook. As far as we know they can forbid everyone from posting and call it a day, it's their website after all.
