Anti-Social Networking: Ukrainian Users Removed by FB for Inciting Hatred

In response to the most asked question at the Q & A session held on Thursday by Mark Zuckerberg, on the subject of offensive content posted by Ukrainian Facebook users, the Facebook CEO said that the offending posts had been taken down because they contravened the network's rules on hate speech, and also explained that Facebook moderation is not carried out by an office in Russia, staffed by anti-Ukrainian Russians.

"Mark, I see many reports of unfair Facebook account blocking, probably as a result of massive fake abuse reports," asked one user named Gregory, who lived in Israel. "These often involve the Facebook accounts of many top pro-Ukrainian bloggers, and posts about the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict."

"My question is, can you or your team please do something to resolve this problem. Maybe create a separate administration for the Ukrainian segment. Block abuse reports from Russia. Or just monitor the top Ukrainian bloggers more carefully. Help us, please."

"I did some research before this, to make sure I had the right answer to this one," Zuckerberg said, remarking that the question had gained 45,000 votes on his Facebook page prior to the Q & A session, the most of any topic to date.

"A bunch of content has been posted that violates the rules that we have around hate speech," said Zuckerberg. "We don't allow people to post content on Facebook that is overtly hateful towards another group, that has ethnic slurs, or that tries to incite violence towards an ethnic group."

Facebook moderators, explained Zuckerberg, looked at the reported posts and determined that some of them "included ethnic slurs against some Russian folks, and we took down those posts."

"I stand by that, I think we did the right thing according to our policies in taking down the posts, and I agree with the policies that we have around not supporting hate speech, I think that's a good set of rules."

Zuckerberg also dismissed claims that the offending Ukrainian posts were moderated by Russian people, operating in Russia. 

"There was this meme that was floating around that this policy, and content moderation was done out of a Russian office by Russians who were anti-Ukrainian." 

"First of all, we don't actually have a Russian office," said the Facebook CEO, disproving the claim.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko also took the time to send in a question to the Q & A session, which was held at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

"Mark, will you establish a Facebook office in Ukraine?" asked the Ukrainian president. 

"We don't have a Ukrainian office, we don't have offices in a lot of countries around the world," said Zuckerberg, politely declining the request.

"We have a European headquarters in Dublin, where we have folks who speak a lot of different languages from around the world look at the different content, and that's what we did here." 

Zuckerberg did, however, apologize for a mistake made by Facebook when it notified users that their posts had been taken down because they contained nudity, and not hate speech, because of "a bug in the software" that Facebook was using. "We have reached out to folks and apologized for the confusion," he said.