Facebook says it's going to restore groups infiltrated by saboteurs

Facebook is "working to restore" a number of groups that have been wrongly removed or affected by "sabotage," according to the company. A spokesman said The edge the social network "deleted several groups from Facebook after detecting content that violates our policies." After investigation, he discovered that the content had been "published to sabotage legitimate and non-violent groups". Facebook is using it to restore the groups concerned and this will happen again. "

The situation started on May 13. An even popular account on Facebook, known as Crossovers Nobody Named (CNAF), which has more than 500,000 members, was suddenly closed. The group's administrators tried to group their users into a new group, "Nobody asked for season 2", but this operation was closed the next day.

Know your own indicated that CNAF members were able to retrieve a screenshot of a group known as the Indonesian Notification Commission (IReC) celebrating the removal of the CNAF page, which led the suspects to believe that the IRC was at the origin of the attacks. Facebook would not confirm if the Indonesian Communications Commission, which suspends groups and pages by publishing dubious content and publishing it en masse, was behind the fake flags.

The news spread quickly and pushed thousands of popular Facebook pages to switch from "private" to "secret" mode to prevent them from closing. While closed Facebook groups require moderators to approve the request to participate, secret groups are virtually undetectable. A group moderator should personally invite someone to join the group. you can not just search for it.

Know your own

The attack of two groups very prominent, although apparently isolated, was felt by a significant number of Facebook users. People have complained, on Facebook and Twitter, to wake up with a range of notifications of the different groups to which they belong recognizing that the status changes from "private" to "secret". Others spoke about their own groups, asking members to be patient and patient. Facebook users have started to call it "The Grand Zuccening of 2019" or, in some cases, "Groupocalypse".

The incident is mainly focused on a network of pages and groups of popular memes. But the fear of suspensions or bans by the Facebook-based reporting system, which is expected to build on its ongoing AI efforts, underscores the vulnerability of the social network moderation approach.

Facebook has long had problems with the supervision of content downloaded by users. These questions cover all areas, from its dominant position on nudity, which brings popular works of art and photographs wrongly famous, to its inability to recognize when immediately viral content, such as the filming of Christchurch, is actually a graphic video violating multiple rules. must be uniformly blocked. Even though it's a relatively innocuous situation involving pages of the same, the widespread panic that prevails among the most active groups and pages of the platform shows just how much users have little confidence in the company's ability to anticipate these problems and prevent their fallout, rather than react after the fact.

A group dedicated to BoJack Cavalier shitposts posted a link to the Know your own explaining the situation by informing the members that they were "doing the work of concealment," said Frank Scarsella, the group's director, The edge He first noticed what was happening after "many of the pages I'm just a member of have started sending these notifications.

"Honestly, some of the groups I was doing were much more likely to be targets, but I immediately informed my team so that we could discuss our own actions," said Scarsella.

Scarsella and her moderators had a conversation when the notification flags of other groups started to appear, and they wondered if they should close their own group in response. Scarsella said most members of the team wanted to be cautious, adding that "the comfort of the group is always important to me, so to reduce fear, I decided to close the group."

"Prevention is better than cure," as Scarsella said, seems to be the reason for panic across Facebook. Know your motherThe editor, Don Caldwell, thinks that after users have started waking up with notifications of group status changes, and after stories have begun to spread about a group Suspicious Facebook posting a series of popular pages with hundreds of thousands of members,

"All the spam notifications that have been sent to all these members and the rumors that have started to spread, to be posted in these groups – it's becoming a big deal," said Caldwell.

There is, however, a problem with moving from a private group to a secret group. If the status is not changed within 24 hours, the group must remain secret for 28 days. This is not a big issue for smaller groups built on a very united community – something that Facebook has been trying to promote recently – but it does matter for pages that want to build a membership base. Caldwell could not predict whether the groups would remain secret for a while or start backtracking, but people are frightened enough that all precautions are taken. Even Scarsella, who does not think that "anyone in the group will embark on a mass media report," is worried about the possible repercussions.

"The group is a very important community for many people, including myself," Scarsella said. "There is always a fear that the platform will remove this community. I would say [we’re] slightly worried because it seems unlikely, but would have serious repercussions for us. "

Some of the deleted groups in the initial flow of mass reports, including Crossovers Nobody Asked For, have since returned to Facebook.