There is no reason they cannot, other than it costs. And if the "little guy" can manually moderate a forum, and respond to unblock requests, then it is no problem for Facebook, or any other big player too.
In truth, Facebook would still save over "the little guy's" moderation methods, as Facebook has the size and scope to develop software tools to significantly improve the workflow of manual moderators.
All this "but it is impossible!" blather I hear, re: manual moderation just means "cause our profits would drop a little".
Oh boo hoo! Manual moderation is the future.
I can absolutely understand they automate that. It IS impossible to manage the volume of posts and comments. Even with hired labor Facebook can afford.
It's not all that simple as you make it to be. How many moderators do you need to moderate millions of people's posts?
More realistically it probably would lead to FB banning accounts to make money. Theoretically you could setup the incentives such that money from banned accounts can only go towards paying moderators though I'm not sure if anyone would believe you.
There is nothing wrong with automatic flagging, only with automatic action after that flagging.
And key here is, a way to legitimately dispute.
Your case is not a parallel case.
There are two challenges which combine into one problem:
1) The amount of bad content posted to a forum rises exponentially with the size of the membership. For every x new people reading, x^y bad content is posted. This is because a large target becomes much more attractive to spammers, trolls, and anyone else looking for a cheap audience.
2) It is extremely difficult to find good moderators. A good moderator will be, within reason, consistent, reliable, AND unbiased. Even with a salary at stake, it is difficult to find people who are even two of those things.
In order to succeed in moderating content well, you need to leverage reliable moderators (today, this means rare humans) with unreliable ones (text analysis and less rare humans) through some sort of statistical system. To date, we have not found a reliable system which can work at scale with this problem, but my faith is in a transparent and verifiable web of trust type system. Slashdot does pretty well, but it's still too opaque, in my opinion.
The problem for Facebook is that the requirement for more moderators grows roughly linearly with the userbase, but the attractiveness to abusers grows exponentially.
Try setting up a publiccode Facebook page and see if that gets flagged.
Oh, maybe that would carve too much into the profit margin?
Luckily we do have governance that can make companies comply with doing ethical business -- even though they don't hit bulls eyes every time.
Plus, 20 years ago only a small number of people were on the internet compared to now.
Where did all of Google's, of Facebook's growth come from? An expanding internet.
That's over. US adoption rates went from basically single digits, to essentially everyone, over 15+ years.
Other places are even pulling away, or becoming more restrictive. EG, China, Russia, and even the EU slapping fines around.
Google, Facebook, the massive growth is over here, in their entrenched markets.
Meanwhile, more and more politicians grew up with the internet, use it daily, have smart phones, and "get" it.
EG, an early adopter at 18, in 2000, would be 40 now. And, adopters of tech at 30, in 2010, are 42 now!
During the rise of Google, eg 2000s, even the youngest Senators and Congress members were unaware of email, or the implications of smartphones, ad networks, tracking.
Now, they almost all use the Internet daily, see annoying banner ads, notice how they are tracked.
Further, some ... before entering politics, will experience the horrors of trying to deal with a real problem with Google, Facebook, and their lack of customer service.
My point is, it was not the speed of market change, but instead, that it was a new market.
That's over now. The tech market is old.
Electronic computers have essentially been around for a century. The internet is easentially a subset of that market, and bam!, that massive growth.
With that growth has come all of this change. Some of this change is not even about the internet, but instead, about storage, capacity growth, and thus centralized control.
(Not just govenment, but for example, large banks have a central office approve or deny things, where 50 years ago branches made such decisions).
My point is, big change in an existent market, due to new tech.
That market has cooled, with repect to change. Another grows. Biotech.
Fueled by computing changes, and other tech changes, it will soon be as transformative as the internet was. Just genetically engineer humans as a start.
But all the other tech surrounding this, it will make the change the internet wrought seem tiny in comparison.
Just imagine furries everywhere, for example.
shudder
That's like saying cars have been around for more than a millennium, since the Romans and Egyptians already had horse-drawn carriages.
World War 2 spurred innovation in automated computing. Post-war, the first computers appeared. Still not enough for the famous quote from the 60s "i believe there's a world market for maybe 5 computers". Whether or not that's an urban legend, in the 60s, that quote was not a priori ridiculous. And let's not claim that less than 5 suffices for "being around" (eg, animals considered extinct have later been found in such numbers).
Nevertheless, let's graciously say that computers have been around since 1960. That's 62 years; rather far short of a century.
Eniac meets the test, hands down. But, 80 years or 100, close enough.
Not nearly as fast as it used to be, except when it comes to breaking things. They get away with it because of folks' relentless optimism towards anything tech-related, and the fact that we are all used to muddling through random issues
Every time I hear someone express that users' bandwidth or compute are free and freely available, I cringe so hard...
"They're too big to do the right thing, so suck it up." What a terrible idea.
If Facebook is really that big, they should be broken up.
For me, that means creating my own little corner of the Internet which I'm comfortable in, and limiting my interactions with the giants.
The result is usually that you end up digging a bigger and bigger moat around your submission and curation process, so that your service is not completely flooded with crap.
I think this is what you are seeing here, rather than censorship of this specific link or cause.
I once posted a URL to a forum site I was developing for a community to Facebook, and somehow it set off the spam detector. For the next several months, I would get regular notices that a comment I left on another group's discussion was marked as spam, and was not visible to anyone else. I was posting regular comments, without links, apolitical, not critical of anyone, just adding to the discussion.
The notices have since stopped, but I still rarely get any response to my comments, and anything I post to my profile's feed usually gets "ignored" completely, while in the past I'd get a pretty stable number of likes from friends (in the low double digits or high single digits.)
As someone who has moderated a decent size sub-reddit in the past, I understand that there's no malicious intent on Facebook's part in this. They are just so much bigger than this one individual that they simply cannot see me, the same way I cannot see a bacteria, and may not notice a tiny gnat.