14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this week Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko made a plea to Facebook’s CEO, asking him to open an office in Ukraine. He stated that an increasingly large number of users had had their posts and their accounts blocked or completely removed from the platform on claims that they were violating the social website’s terms of service, which was entirely untrue.
He went on to accuse Kremlin supporters of being behind the attacks in their attempt to keep facts away from the public eye and, therefore, suppressing people’s right to voice their opinions. He then appealed to Zuckerberg to create a special office in the country which would analyze the false reports coming from Russia.
The president made the request in a Facebook post addressed to the CEO on his official page, in light of the Q&A session taking place two days later.
A senior aide to the president even accused the social media website of siding with Russia, claiming that the bans are indeed politically motivated.
"There is pro-Russian influence and pressure on the Facebook office in Russia," Dmytro Shymkiv claims as quoted in an article in AFP.
The CEO approached the topic during the Q&A session
Although Zuckerberg did not elaborate on the issue in his question round, he did mention the fact that they had indeed taken down a few pages and accounts which had been reported as inappropriate but only because they did not comply with their community standards.
"We made the determination that some of these posts included these ethnic slurs against some Russian folks and we took down those posts."
He even mentioned that they are considering opening an administrative office in Ukraine sometime in the future.
It remains to be seen if the ambiguous answer satisfies the Ukrainian officials given that they have expressed their intention to continue using the social media platform to gain worldwide attention in the conflict with Russia.
Zuckerberg had mentioned before that the reported content is not being analyzed by a Russian team as purported by some Ukrainian leaders, as they do not have an office in Russia either, but by a multilingual team located in Dublin. He also brought this matter into discussion during the question session, just to make it clear that the company is not politically biased.