Facebook Groups Go ‘Secret’ to Avoid Unfair Bans From Troll Reports
- Thousands of Facebook groups went secret and non-discoverable through search.
- The reason is a rumor about a troll team that joins communities, posts banned material, and then reports the group.
- Facebook acknowledged the problem and promised that unfair bans will be retracted.
If you live in the Facebook land, you must have noticed a recent trend that wants a large number of Facebook groups suddenly changing their status to “secret”. The simple reason behind this is because they are afraid they’ll fall, victims of a troll group called “Indonesian Reporting Commission”, who are infiltrating the groups, post inappropriate content as members, and then indulge in mass reporting against the group which eventually leads to a short or even long-term ban. As the notoriety of the trolls grew larger, the rumors about the danger spread, and so group admins decided to do something to protect them from getting ‘Zucced’.
damnnnnnn all of my joined groups are getting to secret from closed why whats happening pic.twitter.com/isHJelGEx8
— 𝓇𝒽𝑒𝒶 ✨ #TTPD (@rheaIity) May 16, 2019
Facebook has identified several cases of such group sabotaging, correlated the actions by looking into specific accounts involved in several of such incidents, and is already restoring groups that have been unfairly received a penalty. However, Facebook has a lot of filtering work to do on that part, as they have rightfully banned several groups in the past weeks, due to the stricter policies that have been implemented by the social media giant. Terrorism, violence, racism, religious extremism, and all that relates to these are no longer acceptable in the context of Facebook groups.
Changing the group status to “secret” does the following: makes your group undiscoverable by a search. This means that reporters, whether trolls or legit, cannot find a group, so it can continue to be. Admins of “secret” groups can still welcome new members, but only through invitations sent directly to the users. This seems like a safe practice for Facebook group admins, and so they are going down that path in the thousands during this past couple of days, causing confusion to their members. It’s an ongoing phenomenon that shows how Facebook is often taking the form of an intercommunicating and coordinated organism.
Some of the admins of these groups even reported that the trolls are going after them following this change of status of the groups. More specifically, the trolls are reporting the personal accounts of the admins and manage to get them deactivated through massive reporting of all their posts, starting from the beginning of time. It looks like Facebook has some reporting threshold auto-banning in place that trolling groups like to have fun with by abusing the tools they have at their disposal.
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