European lawmakers are calling for an investigation into Meta after the mass suspension of accounts posting about anti-government protests in Albania, in what observers believe is a coordinated brigading attack.
“What happened in Albania is tantamount to censorship,” said MEP Alexandra Geese in a statement. She is one of more than 30 Members of the European Parliament who signed a letter asking the European Commission to investigate whether Meta’s actions complied with the EU’s Digital Services Act.
“Mark Zuckerberg’s understanding of ‘freedom of speech’ only seems to cover opinions that align with the political agenda of the Trump administration. This is precisely why we have European rules,” she added.
The “Flamingo Revolution” protests, initially sparked by the development of a luxury resort linked to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, have been taking place daily in the Albanian capital for over three months, demanding changes in the law that allows development on protected land as well as the resignation of the country’s prime minister. The Meta account suspensions almost all appear to be the result of copyright complaints and appear to have begun in late August.
An NGO group investigating the Meta suspensions alleges to WIRED it has evidence that “strongly indicates coordinated activity” led to the complaints.
“What quickly distinguished this from ordinary content moderation was the concentration of cases around the same political and civic movement,” said Martha Dimitratou, founder of Repro Uncensored, a nonprofit organization that tracks digital censorship. In at least one case, the complaint was traced to someone who claimed they had been paid to make the complaint.
Dimitratou told WIRED they had verified around 100 cases of account restrictions connected to protests. “We continue to receive additional reports and, based on the volume and patterns we are seeing, estimate that the true number could be several hundred,” she says.
“We also identified that multiple posts on an account would receive copyright complaints, often five to 10 in a relatively short period, followed by escalating enforcement and, in some cases, the disabling of the entire account,” Dimitratou says. “Taken together, the alleged paid reporting, the repeated sequence of copyright complaints followed by account enforcement, the concentration of targets around the same movement, and the repeated targeting of replacement accounts strongly indicate coordinated activity,” Dimitratou added.
Repro Uncensored found that nearly all affected accounts appeared to be targeted with reports of copyright infringement. In at least 70 cases, the group confirmed removal of posts and videos about the protests, account restrictions, and loss of collaboration features.
“Collectively, the targeted accounts reach millions of people, meaning that when they are restricted or removed, millions can lose access to news, political information, protest documentation, and civic voices they rely on,” Dimitratou says.
One protester told WIRED that the person reporting his account said they had been paid to conduct the attack. On August 20, Arjan Koçi began receiving an influx of emails from Meta. “Someone was claiming that I had taken their work and published it as mine. But it was my video, my voice, my picture,” says Koçi, a British-Albanian who had been documenting the protest on his Instagram account since June.
Koçi’s aerial drone footage showed the massive scale of the demonstrations in Tirana and got millions of views across platforms. “If you receive too many of these reports, Meta will restrict your account,” he told WIRED. Around the same time, he said, several other protesters were also facing similar reports against their accounts. “It was about 1 o’clock in the morning, and I know at least 20 accounts that were closed at the same time,” he said.
