The social media giant said automated systems flagged accounts of Kisan Ekta Morcha as “spam” after it witnessed increased activity on its Facebook page.
Clarifying an error on the part of its automated systems used to review activities on the community pages, Facebook today said it led to the blocking of accounts being used by the farmers protesting the government’s new agricultural laws on Sunday. The social media giant said automated systems flagged accounts of Kisan Ekta Morcha as “spam” after it witnessed increased activity on its Facebook page, adding that the group’s Instagram account (which is owned by Facebook) remained unaffected.
“As per our review, our automated systems found an increased activity on the Facebook page www.facebook.com/kisanektamorcha and flagged it as spam, which violates our Community Standards. We restored the page in less than three hours when we became aware of the context. The review showed that only the Facebook page was affected by the automated systems while the Instagram account remained unaffected,” Facebook said in a statement.
While the company relies on automated systems to detect spams, it also uses human expertise to understand the context behind increased activity on a page, the company added.
“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. However, 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. 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,” Facebook’s spokesperson said.
Earlier on Sunday, Facebook had taken down community pages of Kisan Ekta Morcha for around three hours. The move received immediate criticism from all quarters, with farmers saying that it was an attempt to muzzle their voices.
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