Facebook has an ugly history of making Kremlin-friendly moves.
By Katie Zavadski and Ben Collins
The 2016 presidential election wasn’t the first time Russian trolls used Facebook to mess with another country’s political system. And it wasn’t the first time Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered a weak defense of his company’s role in facilitating Russian online aggression.
Years before Russian trolls organized pro-Trump flash mobs, advertised fake news to tens of millions of Americans, and promoted anti-immigrant hate, they pushed and pushed to get Ukrainian activists suspended from the social network. And it worked, those activists say.
The
anti-Ukrainian trolls lodged endless complaints with Facebook, claiming
that their anti-Kremlin posts were really hate speech or porn. The
social network would dutifully comply with the trolls’ requests.
“I’ve
been blocked [from Facebook] because of a post about a rainbow. I put a
picture of my city [with] a picture of [the] rainbow. The picture said,
‘Everything will be okay,’” one Ukrainian activist, Yaroslav Matiushyn,
told The Daily Beast. “I was blocked for a month.
“One was a text post. It wasn’t erotic text—no porno, nothing erotic.
They complained there is some nudity in it,” he said. Matiushyn was
banned again after, he said, trolls bombarded Facebook with nudity
reports.
Facebook’s inability to tackle Russia’s troll problem in Ukraine
reached a fever pitch in 2014 and 2015, with several Ukrainians writing
into Zuckerberg’s May 2015 call for question submissions at a Facebook
town hall.
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Source: The Daily Beast
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