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Comment by envy2 | Hacker News Reader

This type of behaviour unfortunately seems to be becoming a trend. While not nearly as bad as a raid, Facebook called out a US county prosecutor for attempting to have a page criticising local officials removed in its last transparency report:

Date: October 2015

Content: A page protesting a county animal control agency.

Request: We received a request from a county prosecutor's office to remove a page opposing a county animal control agency, alleging that the page made threatening comments about the director of the agency and violated laws against menacing.

Result: We reviewed the content and determined that the page did not contain credible threats and therefore did not violate our Community Standards. We took no other action on the page for reasons of the public interest.

Source: https://govtrequests.facebook.com/faq/, all the way at the bottom

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And two days ago...

"Facebook bows to anti-science activists, shuts down ‘We Love GMOs and Vaccines’"[1].

It seems like Facebook is playing both sides in this matter.

[1]: https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/08/04/facebook-b...

But isn't there more to the story here?

One of the commenters indicated that FB took down that page for being "violent in nature" (details not provided) -- not simply for its pro-GMO/Vaccine stance.

Disclaimer: I know noting about this particular case.

It is possible to fool FB into removing a page or some content. One way that is sometimes attempted (with some success) is to spam the comments on the page with objectionable content (hopefully goading other people to respond in kind) or (if it's an open group) join it and do the same. Then have other people report the page.

Also, simple misunderstandings happen. E.g. a post gets removed due to being threatening; in fact the post was just citing a threat allegedly made by an official. This seems to be even more likely to happen if many people report that content as objectionable: thus, people opposed to some organization/idea organize into mobs that report related posts as being objectionable.

Seems fairly easy for the group admin to flag abusive posters. If there's no active admin, is it such a great loss for the group to shut down?

This depends on the throughput of spamming that's going on. The throughput can be quite large if there's a significant amount of people cooperating. Also, this means that admins have to spend a nontrivial amount of time on such work on every single day.

The examples I know of are groups of political movements that have a lot of haters, so that might be somewhat of an edge case.

The page in question appears to be back online [1].

I suspect that, when you're dealing with what must amount to tens of millions of reports a day from users, mistakes are made. Thankfully, it seems like this one was corrected.

[1]: https://www.facebook.com/welovegv/

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