Facebook has shut down ‘Atheist Republic’, by far the biggest page operated by the Atheist community on any social media network. The move reportedly followed coordinated ‘mass flagging’ of the page by those who believe in God.
The page was being used by over 1.6 mln Atheists to communicate, and is only one of the several such minority-oriented pages that have been targeted by religious believers via ‘mass reporting’.
Under Facebook’s ‘community guidelines’, if enough people flag a page as being harmful or promoting violence or containing illegal content, the page is automatically hidden without any manual intervention.
“I’m simply in tears,” Jackson said. “Every single day, we have helped numerous atheists.. now, without proper reason, without care, they remove us.. they have cut off our reach to the community we’ve spent years growing.”
She said that for over 6 years, Atheist Republic administrators have had their personal Facebook accounts banned and their posts removed “because people have harassed us over content they didn’t like.
Rest of article from Ultra.news.
I couldn't help but think how things are different here and how something like that could never happen on the platform. Even if everyone were to flag it, the content would still be there and the communication would not be cut like on other centralized platforms.
Here users who harass and wrongly report/flag content get a bigger consequence than just getting your account banned and easily being able to create a new one and continue the harassment.
What are your thoughts on this? How do you think the Steemit platform differs from the others regarding these problems?
Not to mention trolls becoming a bigger issue every day on most platforms.