Facebook needs to clean up its act, says man who just had another post removed

But it’s not the followers of the BJP that Sinha is worried about. It’s Facebook.

“A lot of people tend to report me and mostly it’s the ‘bhakts’,” said Sinha, referring to the term used in social media for followers of the BJP.

“And because of mass reporting, Facebook has an automated system which immediately removes the content. The problem is, there is no grievance redress mechanism on the platform. I have written to them twice about this and there has been no response from their side,” he added.

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Sinha, who also runs a website called truthofgujarat.com that focuses on the 2002 riots and the ‘fake encounter’ killings in the state, has over 10,000 followers on his personal profile. He insists there is nothing offensive in his posts and that there should be a manual process on the part of Facebook to deal with content ‘reported’ by others. One time, he said, he got blocked because someone else abused him.

“Facebook claims to be this messiah of freedom of speech and expression. I think, it should try to get its act together,” he said.

When contacted, a Facebook spokesperson said a single report is enough to take down content, if deemed violating of the company’s policies.

“We have Global Community Standards that are designed to help people understand what is acceptable to share on Facebook.  Anyone can report content to us if they think it goes against our standards. It doesn’t matter how many times a piece of content is reported, it will be treated the same. One report is enough to take down content if it violates our policies, and multiple reports will not lead to the removal of content if it meets our standards. That said, because we have millions of reports to review each week, mistakes do happen, which is what happened here and we’re sorry.”