Defend the ardor of moderators

The petition against political blocking of accounts on Facebook and the provocations of the Prochrevsky trolls signed more than 10 thousand people on Change.org . According to the initiator of the campaign, journalist Ostap Karmodi, almost half of the signed - Ukrainian users, about a quarter - Russian.

"Facebook has turned into an effective tool of the Kremlin," "an obedient tool with which enemies of freedom of speech plug the mouths to disagree," the authors of the petition write. The appeal is compiled in English, Russian and Ukrainian.

The Facebook administration is called upon to unlock all Russian and Ukrainian accounts frozen in recent weeks and completely stop blocking until the new moderation system is created from political attacks.

“It’s not the first month of Internet trolls that thousands of complaints about popular bloggers opposing the Russian authorities have been giving up on salary. Reacting to these complaints, Facebook blocks the accounts of famous Ukrainian public figures and Russian opposition. In recent months, the number of such blocks has increased many times,” the authors of the petition say. Among the others, the accounts of bloggers Anton Nosik, Rustema Adagamov, Glory Rabinovich, artist Alexander Roitburd, public figure Sergey Parkhomenko, journalists Arkady Butusov, Vakhtang Kipiani, Andrei Kapustin, Anton Krasovsky were blocked.

“We don’t know why Facebook is so readily blocking people opposing the policy of the Russian authorities,” the team said. “Perhaps the team that is analyzing complaints about Russian -and -language posts is incompetent, unprofitable or politically engaged. Perhaps the case is not enough. It is important that the Russian authorities have learned to use the existing moderation system for their political purposes. "

The petition was signed, in particular, Alexei Navalny, Boris Akunin, Lev Rubinstein, Sergey Zhadan.

On May 14, answering the question of blocking in the Ukrainian segment , the founder and head of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg assured that the Russian office is not related to the moderation of Ukrainian accounts. According to him, a number of reports of Ukrainian users were deleted for the use of the "language of hatred", while the authors mistakenly indicated a different reason - the image of naked bodies. Facebook apologized for this mistake, Tsuckerberg noted.

The activity of the pro-Kremlin Internet trolls is already discussed in the Western press. Representatives of the German Chancellor Angels Merkel recently commented on the "cleansing" of insulting Russian -language comments on her Instagram . In The New York Times Magazine , detailed material was published about the "troll factory" - the St. Petersburg Agency for Internet Research, whose budget can reach 20 million rubles a month. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that with this structure the Kremlin "had no interaction."