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Glad I went back and read the end of the article. For anyone else who is about to give up and let themselves believe Facebook was unfairly moralizing in this case:

> For Mr. Letwin, that can’t come soon enough. A month after his account was disabled, he received an email apologizing, saying it had all been a mistake on Facebook’s part.

> A Facebook spokesman said a report was filed against Mr. Letwin for using a fake name, which he had not done, and a reviewer looking at his account then mistakenly thought it violated Facebook’s standards regarding promotion of violence and terrorism. But the process took far longer than it should have, he acknowledged, saying that typically, an appeal should be responded to within a few days.



Probably some zionists didn't like his group and probably mass reported his account. They do have a dedicated group for that kinda stuff.


There seems to be well organised groups out to promote the Israeli viewpoint on any social media site which discusses it.

Take Reddit for example, every time the topic comes up it gets absolutely inundated with "people" trying to browbeat any non-pro point of view into submission (through a combination of downvoting and just outright argument from multiple puppets).

While there are definitely real people who feel that strongly about the topic and have similar views, all you have to do is start looking at the account histories of others to feel like there is a lot of sockpuppeting going on.

I'd love for the site admins on social media sites to look into this to see if there is any "unusual activity" going on, particularly Reddit.



Both Facebook and Twitter seem very susceptible to "report" campaigns. Anybody who can drum up the numbers can silence somebody else.


I have friends whose ministry is focused on problems in religion A and making converts from religion A to religion B. There is apparently a group of religion A members who flag literally everything they post as hate speech. Photos of themselves? Hate speech. Photos they took of religiously significant locations? Hate speech. Telling us that her mom is in the hospital? Hate speech.

Eventually, after hours on the phone with FB support, it appears to be settled. I would love to know the technical means FB used -- whether they marked my friends' account as "always manually review flags", whether they've got better voting ring detection, or whether they simply found a group of abusing flaggers as a result of the first phone call and that group isn't slick enough to make new accounts.


Thanks for the tl;dr. It seemed like an awfully long article for non-news.


Well, it wasn't really non-news. It's an interesting form of denial of service.




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