OREANDA-NEWS. July 22, 2015.  Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Dmytro Shymkiv had a meeting with Facebook representatives – Head of Public Policy for Central and Eastern Europe Gabriella Cseh, Director of Public Policy for Nordics, Central and Eastern Europe and Russia Thomas Myrup Kristensen and EMEA Policy Communications Manager Sally Aldous.

The parties discussed groundless blocking of profiles of Ukrainian Facebook users. “We take this issue very seriously and want to make sure that there is an understanding between the company and users,” Mr. Kristensen said. He also emphasized that Facebook community was monolithic and had no borders. Thus, the rules are the same for all users. However, Facebook is trying to take into account specifics of every region, especially in situations similar to that of Ukraine. “Unfortunately, Ukrainian experience is not unique. We observe the same situation in Israel,” Gabriella Cseh noted.

According to Mr. Kristensen, the blocking mechanism is fully manual and doesn’t provide for any automatic process. “Each complaint is considered by a specialist. Then, his decision is verified once again. Moreover, complaints, for example, about Ukrainian users are processed by a different specialist or even a different office on every occasion. The majority of them is processed in Facebook office in Dublin, Ireland. Specialists are carefully selected and clearly adhere to the Facebook public policy,” he said. At the same time, the number of complaints about a publication doesn’t matter – it will be processed in the same way.

Dmytro Shymkiv noted that the problem could be at the level of human factor for Russian-language publications or at the level of understanding the peculiarities of the language for Ukrainian-language publications. “Russian-language publications are processed by specialists who know this language. Usually, these are people born in Russia. They can have their own civil views that affect their objectivity. At the same time, Ukrainian language is not so spread on the Internet. It has a lot of nuances that may be unclear for the people out of context,” he explained.

Dmytro Shymkiv offered the assistance of the National Institute of Ukrainian Language in the determination of words and phrases that have a meaning of threats or “hate speech” officially banned by the rules of the social network. The parties agreed to cooperate in the most resonant occasions of violation in the Ukrainian segment of the network.

Gabriella Cseh noted that any fixed violation of rules by Facebook specialists would lead to administrative sanctions, up to dismissal. She promised to carefully monitor the situation in the Ukrainian segment of Facebook.