Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Zuckerberg Blew Off Russian Troll Warnings Before the Attack on America


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. 

Click here for the full article. 

Source: The Daily Beast

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