Ukrainian Facebook users who express their views on Russia's war against Ukraine say some of their posts are being wrongly deleted from the world's largest social network.
Bloggers Zen Antipop and Dmytro Ivanov said the country’s blogging community plans to
address Facebook management with a statement asking for fairer moderation of
their writing.
Facebook’s usual policy includes blocking
accounts that contain posts marked as abusive by other users.
“We’re neutral and don’t take
anyone’s sides,” said Thomas Kristensen, Facebook’s director of public
policy in Central and Eastern Europe, in an interview with Delo website. “What matters, it’s enough to have
a report from just one person for us to react. We’re not waiting for a signal
from 100 or 1,000 people. It’s not a democracy, when many people vote for
something and it happens. The issue is only about following our rules. We’re
just reacting to the reports.”
The Menlo Park-based social network
hasn’t replied to the Kyiv Post’s request to provide a further comment on the
issue.
On Jan. 5, Antipop saw his post with a
poem and a picture of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s nationalist-minded poet,
deleted. A quote contained the word “moskal,” which is a rather rude
way to call Russians, but not profanity and is considered to be a part of the
officially recognized Ukrainian vocabulary.
Moreover, the blogger’s account was
blocked for three days.
On Jan. 27, his Facebook account was
blocked again. This time, he posted a picture of Vitaliy Churkin, Russia’s
ambassador to the United Nations who’s known for aggressive remarks on Ukraine
and speaking no English. The post said “Churkin – khuylo!”
(“Churkin is a dick!”)
“Of course, the post with Churkin holds
much more controversy than the case with Shevchenko’s poetry,” Antipop
says. “When Russians post more radical things, they are not blocked, even
if Ukrainian users report their content as abusive.”
“If someone does not have many
friends or followers on Facebook or the user is just not very active, his post
is unlikely to get noticed. My posts get noticed, which means they are widely
read,” Antipop explains. “That might also mean that my profile has
been noticed by some Russian bots, who report the posts of active Ukrainian
patriots directly, abusing the Facebook’s complaint policies.”
“If we don’t raise the problem it
will get worse. No one will fix it later,” a blogger adds.
According to him, the Ukrainian segment
might be moderated by the Russian citizen who is biased in decisions he makes.
In August 2014, local Facebook users
wrote an open appeal to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, that raised
the same issue calling it “politically-motivated blocking of the prominent
Facebook users.”
It called “to consider the
possibility of changing the administrator of Ukrainian Facebook for a citizen
of Ukraine or any neutral country, which has no vested interest in further escalation
of the conflict.”
No official reply to this has been
publicized so far.
Kyiv Post staff writer Bozhena Sheremeta can be reached at [email protected]. The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe.
