Yesterday I wrote about Facebook's mass closure of groups used by Arab atheists and secularists following attacks by Muslim activists. Facebook now seems to have had second thoughts about its decision and over the last 24 hours almost all the affected groups have been restored.
This morning, however, the restored groups were reporting fresh attacks by cyber-jihadists.
The attacks mostly take two forms. One is to bombard Facebook with vexatious complaints, accusing the atheist groups of hate speech and other breaches of Facebook's "community standards". (The affected groups insist that they do not allow hate speech and take steps to prevent it.)
A second tactic is to infiltrate the groups and deliberately post offensive material in order to complain about it to Facebook. Sometimes the offensive material is disguised so that group administrators will not immediately spot it. According to Usama al-Binni of the Arab Atheist Network, one of the groups that was blocked and then restored: [al-bab.com] Read more
