Facebook's New Policies Make Harassment Easy

Facebook's New Policies Make Harassment Easy: "

North Africa has become a testing ground for a new sort of online harassment, and ReadWriteWeb is in the middle of it. Groups of Islamists are using the proliferation of Facebook's public pages to single out users they consider ideologically unorthodox (a broad category indeed by their definition) and then using Facebook's public ban process to stop their mouths.

Once a target is identified, groups of allied Facebook users report the target as defying terms of service. Once a certain number of users mark a profile to be blocked, Facebook automatically does so. How do we know? Because our French editor, Fabrice Epelboin was one such target.

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On ReadWriteWeb France, Epelboin published a translation of a post by Jillian York that identified this phenomenon. Epelboin summed it up.

'(A) group was created on Facebook (in Arabic) for the sole purpose of reporting, and thus having removed, Facebook profiles of atheist Arabs. The group, which appears to have also been removed, was entitled 'Facebook pesticide' and its sole purpose was to 'identity Atheists / Agnostic / anti-religion in the Arab world and specifically in Tunisia ...' Once identified, the group members would then attempt to report such users.'

Although the post by York was modestly received in the original, in the RWW translation, it was very popular and attracted over 200 comments. One of the commenters on this post was 'Hannibal,' the apparent leader of a group who banded together to block Epelboin's Facebook profile. If he had not been been able to speak directly to Facebook's French PR representative, he would have automatically been banned, as others have.

'All of this started when groups and fanpages became public,' Epelboin said, 'allowing those guys to make some list of profiles to be harassed on Facebook, taking advantage of a loophole in Facebook's crowd-sourced moderation process when it comes to banning profiles: if a few dozen members alert Facebook about one profile as being a fake, it is automatically deactivated.'

Facebook has been informed of this situation. They've been quick to console but slow to act. This policy remains in place. We hate to say we told you so, but, you know. We told you so.

As of posting time, the press representatives from Facebook have not responded questions we sent on this issue.

Screenshot by Jillian York

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