Summary:
There were complaints especially from non-English speaking Facebook users' of their statuses being mistakenly or intentionally deleted for allegedly violating Facebook's posting guidelines. This was because Facebook did not have a proper support system to genuinely read the non-English content and make decisions. Sometimes the content of the status would not have any abusive of defamatory language, but nevertheless would get taken down after being reported by a group of people as "offensive". For other languages than English, Facebook was unable to identify the group approach that is used to
Allegations:
- In 2012, Facebook was criticised after it mistakenly deleted a free speech group's post on human rights in Syria. The status update which was removed was by Article 19, a group which campaigns for freedom of speech, had posted a link to a Human Rights Watch report detailing alleged torture in the Arab country.
- Agnes Callamard, the executive director of Article 19, accused Facebook of acting like "judge, jury and executioner" in the way it removes material from the website.
- Callamard complained that Article 19 had received no explanation or warning from Facebook before it took the material down and said: "The deletion shows the looming threat of private censorship. We commend Facebook for creating tools to report abuse, but if your post was wrongly deleted for any reason, there is no way to appeal."
Defence:
- Facebook did not explain to Article 19 why it had deleted the material, but told the Guardian that the post was mistakenly removed after being reported as containing offensive content.
- A spokesman for Facebook said that the post was mistakenly removed by a member of its moderation team due to the high volume of take-down requests.