Richard Allan Director of Public Policy EMEA Facebook 23 April 2014

Dear Mr Allan, It looks like Facebook had been gamed to unpublish the page of a Jewish artist based in Israel. The page concerned (id 183128421717089), shows the artists art work. It has been closed for sharing pornographic content, yet the content itself (shown in the pages following this letter) is of a religious nature and shows nature or people in modest religious dress. It seems highly improbably that Facebook staff got this wrong so badly which leads us to believe it was triggered by an algorithm reacting to false reports. We werent aware that Facebook autotriggering the action against pages without human intervention, but it appears that this is the case for at least some types of user reports. We believe the sort of barrage of false reports needed to trigger such a removal would need to be targeted and intentional. Given the contents of the page we believe it must have been targeted for its Jewish nature, and as such this would be an antisemitic incident. Here is the message received by the page owner:

Are you also able to confirm if an algorithm is automatically unpublishing pages without review by Facebook staff, and if so, could you please outline what happens next in order to manually correct false positives? Particularly, is user action required or is action taken by Facebook to have these decisions reviewed as a matter of course? If there is a process of review, what is the time frame for this occurring? Finally, are you able to have this particular page reviewed and reinstated? For information, we have noted that a page protesting against the closure was created 6 hours ago at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Zuckerberg-Re-Activate-Alex-Levin-Art-Page-Now/851265461556469 and that information about this now circulating via e-mail. Regards, Andre Oboler and David Matas Co-Chairs, Online Antisemitism Working Group Global Forum to Combat Antisemitism

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