What is Facebook up to?

[DMB]

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyat ... x-muslims/

Facebook Just Placed Unnecessary Restrictions on Two Groups That Reach Many Ex-Muslims

This afternoon, the Facebook pages for Ex-Muslims of North America (with about 24,000 Likes) and Atheist Republic (more than 1,600,000 Likes) were hit with a restriction that allows them to post updates… but not reach any of their subscribers.

Essentially, nothing they post will show up automatically on their followers’ timelines, so their posts have no reach. The only way you can see their material is by going to their pages directly — which many people simply don’t do.

The restriction is in effect, Facebook says, for a full week.

Allie Jackson, the CEO of Atheist Republic, said on her personal Facebook page:
For over 6 years, Atheist Republic admins have been banned on our personal accounts and have had perfectly acceptable posts removed, because people have harassed us over content they didn’t like. Facebook knows their algorithms are abused by people and groups. They blame us for not following terms of service, or community standards, while the people harassing us get rewarded for organizing complaints over content they disagreed with.

She added in an email to me:
These groups and pages are the only homes to millions of atheists who otherwise wouldn’t have anyone to speak to. Our organization helps people with a one on one support group, and we also help people figure out asylum plans when their lives are threatened in Islamic countries and need to flee. It’s not just a page…it’s a lifeline.


At a time when Facebook is one of the few places where ex-Muslims and religious dissidents can gather and discuss their views, these restrictions aren’t just mere inconveniences.

If anyone can shed light on this matter, or has the ability to remove the restrictions, your help would be appreciated.

***Update***: A similar restriction was apparently placed on دخلك بتعرف؟, an Arabic language page with a large atheist audience, two days ago.

***Update 2***: This may be part of an organized attempt at shutting down pages that are “anti-Islamic.”

[DMB]

Now it's even worse.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyat ... isnt-true/

Facebook Shuts Down Atheist Republic’s Page, Presumably For Being “Anti-Muslim” (Which Isn’t True)


We mentioned yesterday that the Facebook pages for a few groups catering to ex-Muslims had suddenly become “restricted.” Their posts would no longer be seen by their own followers. It was supposed to be a temporary ban lasting a week.

Now one of those groups, Atheist Republic — which had more than 1,600,000 followers — has been shut down entirely.

As one commenter noted,

That page helped atheists in theocratic and highly religious countries find safe refuge and asylum. By shutting down the Atheist Republic page, Facebook is literally killing people. We need this page back up!!!

There’s reason to think this is part of a concerted effort to remove “anti-Muslim” pages. However, there is a difference between a page that criticized aspects of Islam and one that demeans or condemns all Muslims.

That page is removed. Evangelist bigot Franklin Graham‘s page is still up. I don’t get it.

If anyone has contacts at Facebook who can fix this, please get in touch with Allie Jackson, the CEO of Atheist Republic. You can also check out thegroup’s website here. At least Facebook can’t shut that down.

Facebook has a process for appealing an unpublished page. We’ll see if that goes anywhere.

[DMB]

http://arif.eu/archives/174?utm_campaig ... ialnetwork

Islamic Digital Terrorism
This is how Islamists attack Atheist IDs and Pages on Facebook.
Abuse of Facebook auto-suspension moderation by mass false reporting.
‘Reporting Groups’ concept used by Islamists congregating to serve one purpose only, false-report to Facebook, in masses

Few days ago, I came across an article being shared by Atheist Republic, discussing how they are under attack after publishing the Rainbow Kaaba. I got interested and read the whole article where the author described how their Facebook page, their Admins are getting abuse from Islamits, threats and how their Facebook accounts are getting suspended for no good reason.
To my surprise, I wasn’t surprised, at all!
Because, we, the Bangladeshi bloggers, have suffered this kind of attack all too often. This kind of mindless attack, which I call Facebook terrorism, was thrown at us since the dawn of blogging history. But until now, I used to think attacks such as this were only limited to Bengali speaking blog-sphere. We are the most attacked blog community, and have to deal with the worst kind of Islamic infestation. four of our bloggers / authors were killed earlier this year due to Atheistic / Science blogging / writing.
After reading the Atheist Republic article, it now looks like, this problem is not confined within Bangladesh anymore. The Global Islamic digital terrorism has now acquired enough resource and network to expand it’s attack anywhere in the internet. Atheist Republic, it’s Facebook page and it’s Admins are also now targets of digital violence.

I will explain below, for the unsuspecting bloggers, how Facebook terrorism is leveraging the ‘numbers matter’ strategy, and how the weak moderation policy of Facebook is harming freedom of speech and thought.

As you may know there’s 1.6 billion Muslims around the world. A great number of them have access to the internet and own a Facebook account. we potentially have millions Muslims primed for protest against defamation of their religion (prophet)

Islamic authoritarian system works on a top-down approach. Social and psychological structure of pious muslims rely heavily on ‘scholarly’ person(s) who announces strategy and ‘to do’ actions. These actionable commands are then obeyed by average Muslims without thinking and thereby creating waves of action within a very short time span. However, for this kind of instruction sets to work, the average Muslim must be able to understand and excute without too much hassle and disruption.

Facebook clicktivism, is a very good example of this kind of zero-touch-actions. Muslims are asked to perform certain actions, which helps the organizer of the action-collective to achieve desired effect on the person/page through hundreds or may be thousands of individual clicks.
Now let’s talk about how Facebook is such fertile ground for Atheistic account deletion.

In an effort to make Facebook a ‘Safe Place’ for children and families, there are ‘Reporting’ facilities provided by Facebook. You can report any item you see on Facebook and can report it for reviewing. If a moderator finds the reported item to be in violation of any policy, they will take actions.

here it gets a bit tricky. Since Facobook has massive user base, All these reporting are not moderated and responded by FB staff manually. There are automation in place for certain cases. One case could be, (I’m guessing here) if the number of similar report for one ID or page or a status or a photo is considerably high, Facebook automation kicks in and takes that item / ID / Page / Status / Photo down almost instantly. As if there’s a counter ticking always and the Nth report will remove it automatically.

Now, how do one post / ID can get attacked by 100s of reports!! you wonder? answer is simple. By being targetted by the ‘Reporting Groups’. In these groups certain ultra active individuals will share a direct ‘single-click’ reporting link to the members, who’s job, day and night, is to report report and do some more report. All they need to do is put up a post detailing the offence and provide some links masked behind link -shortening services. The members then open the post, click and submit the ‘report’. And that’s all it takes to build enough clicks for Facebook Automated suspension / deletion script to kick in. It’s that simple. There are perticualy evangelical ‘reporters’ out there who’s day and night is spent fueling this reporting machine. Facebook provides a nice little area called ‘Reporting Center’, and these busy bees have particularly blossoming report center...

...So, the Problem we have at our hands may get escalated very very quickly if Pious and ‘moderate’ muslims start to form such groups. At some point All ‘non-Islam-conforming’ content will be at risk of being wiped out by this process.

By exposing and documenting this abusive process I now run the risk of my account getting suspended and/or deleted. If you’re reading this, then please ‘Follow’ my profile and/or ‘comment’ on my posts.

What can we do? I think there’s little we can do as individuals.

But as a collective… We can…
1. Have our Facebook accounts secured with dual authentication.
2. Inform Facebook authorities to enable ‘captcha’ for reporting, so that direct link abuse can be reduced.
3. Make Facebook authorities aware that this sort of abuse is happening and make a policy level change so that groups congregating for such violence can be reported and with enough evidence Facebook should remove these groups and / or take precautionary actions against perpetrators.

end of the day, we must awake our selves that something dark is engulfing us. If we don’t know how to make ourselves aware, we will soon have nowhere to go.

Thanks for Reading. Please don’t forget to Share and let others know.

Regards,
Arif Rahman
London, UK.

[I am a Bangladeshi Blogger living in the UK. I am lucky (so far) that I’m in the UK. My friends have been killed and my name is in the ‘List’ as Arifur Rahman]

[JamesBannon]

Atheist Republic is back up. I wonder if any of my posts will get deleted. I've been fairly vocal recently.

[Hermit]

[quote=""JamesBannon""]Atheist Republic is back up. I wonder if any of my posts will get deleted. I've been fairly vocal recently.[/quote]The admins have asked themselves if there are any offensive posts that need to be deleted and decided in the negative.

Now I wonder if followers of Atheist Republic and similar sites get their automatic notifications that new posts have been made back.