Facebook Is Not Your Friend

“This message violates our community standards on spam.” Screenshot of a message from Facebook informing Petersburg news website MR7.ru that the world’s mightiest social network was blocking the public’s access to the website’s articles on the city’s battle with the coronavirus—and the battle of Petersburg doctors and other healthcare workers with a corrupt, mendacious regime. Courtesy of Vit New and Galina Artemenko

Galina Artemenko
Facebook
May 27, 2020

Friends, please share this information as widely as possible and don’t rule out the possibility that my account and the accounts of my colleagues MR7.ru editor-in-chief Sergei Kvalchenko and MR7.ru journalist Anastasia Gavrielova may also be blocked in the near future, unfortunately.

What happened was that the Facebook page of our publication and all our texts were allegedly blocked “due to numerous complaints.”

The social network has blocked our articles about the coronavirus in Petersburg after receiving multiple complaints about “distributing spam.” There was no spam, however, only numerous articles about how Petersburg doctors do not have enough PPE, how doctors are not paid extra for working with Covid-19 patients, how hospitals have become overcrowded, and how health workers have been quitting or getting sick on the job.

Facebook has started blocking our posts containing texts about the fight against the coronavirus in Petersburg. The social network’s messages state that the posts “violate community rules” and have been blocked due to spam complaints. It is likely that the page was blocked after someone sent them numerous complaints about spam and offensive posts.

During the pandemic, MR7.ru has been constantly covering current hot-button issues in a timely manner. Now, however, Facebook has closed access to articles by Galina Artemenko and Anastasia Gavrielova. These correspondents have told readers about how doctors have been looking for PPE for their employees and face a shortage of specialists (“As in a shop, the head doctor looks for PPE for his people”), about how medical workers in Petersburg have not received promised bonuses or have been paid kopecks for risky work with coronavirus patients (“We were paid not for the risk, but for hours and minutes”), and about how doctors have been infected while saving people (“Covid brought Alexandra to Moscow”).

In addition, MR7.ru has been covering the situation in Lenexpo [a trade show center in Petersburg where a temporary coronavirus hospital has been set up], telling the stories of people who have been forced to go there, and in psychoneurological resident treatment facilities, which house thousands of patients with disabilities and which have also been compromised by the coronavirus. There are many examples of such publications, but they can no longer be read on [Facebook].

Editor-in-chief Sergei Kovalchenko has written to Facebook, refuting the allegations that MR7.ru has been spreading spam, but has not yet received a reply.

Translated by the Russian Reader