Facebook explains briefly unpublishing Kisan Ekta Morcha's page; says move was automated

Social media giant Facebook on Monday released a statement after it briefly unpublished the page of Kisan Ekta Morcha on its platform a day ago. A Facebook spokesperson said that as per their review, the automated systems found an increased activity on Kisan Ekta Morcha's page and hence it was "flagged as spam" violating the company's Community Standards. "We restored the page in less than 3 hours when we became aware of the context," the Mark Zuckerberg-led company said.

'We restored the page in less than 3 hours': Facebook

"The vast majority of our work fighting spam is done automatically using recognizable patterns of problematic behaviour. For example, if an account is posting over and over in quick succession that’s a strong sign something is wrong," Facebook said. "We also rely on our human review team to work on cases where human expertise is needed to understand the context of a particular situation," the statement added. In Q3, 2020 out of the 1.9 billion pieces of content removed globally for violating our policies on spam, we restored 74.9 mn pieces of content globally when we identified issues ourselves, the company said.

Earlier in the day, Congress leader Karti Chidambaram and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) came out in support of the farmers' and slammed the social media giant. Taking to Twitter, the ruling party in Delhi said that it condemns the act by Facebook and stands in solidarity with Kisan Ekta Morcha. "AAP will keep raising its voice in support of farmers on every social media platform," it added. Congress MP Karti Chidambaram, in his one-line response, wrote, "And Facebook told our parliamentary standing committee that it found no reason to pull down posts of Bajrang Dal!"

'When they can't beat us ideologically...'

"This is what they can do when people raise their voices....... " Kisan Ekta Morcha tweeted with a screenshot of its Facebook page which was unpublished. In the screenshot, a Facebook warning can be seen saying that the page had gone against its community standards on spam.

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"In midst of a Facebook Live I was doing from Kisan Ekta Morcha's page, we get a notification that the FB page has been unpublished," Swaraj India leader Yogendra Yadav said in a tweet. He added, "There must be something about farmers that this govt is particularly scared of & something about this govt that Facebook is particularly scared of."

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