Opponents’ ‘report abuse’ backfires

On Sunday, when right wing groups came out in large numbers to disrupted the ‘Kiss of Love’ protest against ‘moral policing’, they did not expect it to have an opposite effect to that intended, — of making the protest popular across social networks and news media.

Nursing a wound from this backlash, they went online in droves and started clicking ‘report abuse’ on Kiss of Love’s Facebook page.

By Monday morning, when the administrators of the page tried to log in, the page was gone.

In a short while, all of the 15 administrators had their profile pages blocked and another related group, ‘Freethinkers’, was also deleted.

“The ‘Kiss of Love’ page had more than 50,000 members at the time of blocking and this indicates an organised attempt by these groups to take it down. Some of us got our profiles back after going through stringent identification process, while many failed to clear it. Anyway, we soon started another page and thousands joined soon,” says Farmis Hashim, one of the administrators.

The sudden deletion has raised questions from activists on how Facebook decides whether a page is to be deleted.

The Facebook terms and conditions in this regard say that “when something gets reported to Facebook, we'll review it and remove anything that doesn't follow the Facebook Community Standards.”

In further elaboration, it says that “content that attacks people based on their actual or perceived race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or disease is not allowed.”

In a happy turn of events, the Kiss of Love page was reinstated by evening, and the number of members soon crossed 75,000.