New Delhi: After farmers’ unions, which have been protesting against new farm laws brought in by the Central government, alleged on Sunday that Facebook had blocked their page ‘Kisan Ekta Morcha’, the social media giant has responded on Monday.The unions had alleged that Facebook blocked their page at the behest of the Central government after a video, which countered the Centre’s claims on the new farm laws, was published on the page.
Facebook, however, today said that the page was blocked only temporarily and was restored within three hours. Further, the social media company said the page was blocked after its “automated systems” detected unusual activity on the page and it was flagged as spam.Here is what a Facebook spokesperson said today:
As per our review, our automated systems found an increased activity on Facebook page ‘Kisan Ekta Morcha’ and flagged it as spam, which violates our Community Standards. We restored the page in less than 3 hours when we became aware of the context.“The vast majority of our work fighting spam is done automatically using recognizable patterns of problematic behaviour. For example, if an account is posting over and over in quick succession, that’s a strong sign that something is wrong.
We also rely on our human review team to work on cases where human expertise is needed to understand the context of a particular situation. In Q3, 2020 out of the 1.9 billion pieces of content removed globally for violating our policies on spam, we restored 74.9 mn pieces of content globally when we identified issues ourselves.”
Earlier, the unions had alleged that the Centre was afraid of the agitating farmers. Baljeet Singh, a person involved with the agitation, as saying: “The government is afraid of the farmers.”Separately, the unions had said at a joint press conference at the Singhu Border: “On December 27, PM (Narendra) Modi will speak in ‘Mann ki Baat’ but we want to appeal to all of you to bang utensils till the time the PM is speaking.”
The protesting farmers have been camping at Delhi for more than three weeks now, demanding the repeal of newly-formulated laws.
