Ukraine Asks Zuckerberg to Discipline Kremlin Facebook Bots

mi writes "Ukrainian media is reporting (link in Ukrainian), that Facebook is getting increasingly heavy-handed blocking Ukrainian bloggers. The likely explanation for the observed phenomenon is that Facebook's Ukrainian office is located in Russia and is headed by a Russian citizen (Catherine Skorobogatov). For example, a post calling on Russian mothers to not let their sons go to war was blocked "Due to multiple complaints". Fed up, Ukrainian users are writing directly to Zukerberg to ask him to replace Catherine with someone, who would not be quite as swayed by the "complaints" generated by Russian bots.

Comments

Re:Maybe, but maybe not...

[Zocalo]

Reading between the lines of the article I think you probably got the gist of what happens, but missed the crux of the complaint. I get the impression that Ukrainians believe something like this is happening:

1. 1. Pro-Ukraine poster makes a post.
2. 2. Pro-Russian bots generate complaints into Facebook's automated systems.
3. 3. The post gets automatically blocked.
4. 4. OP appeals to the Ukrainian office to get it re-instated.
5. 5. OP's appeal is denied because the Ukrainian office is actually in Russia and headed by an alledgedly non-neutral Russian.

There's definitely a potential problem there, and one that will probably be repeated in similar circumstances in the future. Seems to me that the best thing FB (or anyone else) can do in this situation is to remove oversight for posts made by both sides from regional offices in the area in question and hand them off to more neutral offices, at least for posts concerning the conflict.

Re:Maybe, but maybe not...

[Zocalo]

That would be why I wrote "Ukrainians believe", but given the obvious bias shown by certain elements of the media on both sides of the conflict I don't think it much of a stretch that this could actually be happening. My point though was more about the general problem here in that most tend to be local enough to fall within the territory of the same regional office for a given company, and that office is within a country with a stake in the conflict, let alone one that has a track record for having poor freedom of the press, then accusations like this are probably inevitable. Now that the issue has been highlighted, we can only hope that FB et al think about how they might deal with such potential censorship in the future.

Re:Rules of war

[phantomfive]

(heaven forbid they try, there are NATO air resources all around the place and those might get involved, resulting in a far larger-scale war).

NATO will not go to war with Russia over Ukraine. None of the members of NATO have that obligation since Ukraine is not a member, and moreover, none of them want to risk lives to defend Ukraine. It's a similar situation to Hungary in the 50s......did anyone help them? Of that situation, Krushkev said:

"In a newspaper interview in 1957, Khrushchev commented "support by United States ... is rather in the nature of the support that the rope gives to a hanged man."