Meta reported that Ukrainian moderators work with Ukrainian content on Facebook and Instagram and they have no moderators in Moscow in response to Forbes' request.

"Contrary to some myths, we do not have and never had moderators working from Moscow. We also do not have and never had an office there," the company said. According to Meta, 40.000 of their employees take care of security issues. 15.000 of them are content reviewers. Their teams are located all over the world in different time zones.

The regional office, which manages 28 countries of the entire region of Central and Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, is located in Warsaw.

As the company said, they use a combination of human labor and artificial intelligence technologies to check the content of user posts and complaints. Ukrainian speakers who understand the local context work in the team.

Ukrainian content that requires linguistic and cultural expertise is checked by Ukrainian moderators.

"We work with more than 90 fact-checking partners in more than 60 languages to review and assess the accuracy of content," the company said in its response.

Meta also claims that the number of complaints does not affect the decision to remove content. If the post does not violate the rules and standards of the social network, even a large number of complaints will not lead to blocking.

Since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, Ukrainian users constantly face moderation in social networks. Pages and posts related to the war and its consequences on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn are blocked and deleted. However, the companies themselves do not disclose the exact moderation algorithms.

At the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Meta created the Special Operations Center. The company calls it another line of defense against misinformation, enabling faster removal of content that violates community standards and rules.

The company says that it has increased financing for Ukrainian partners from the fact check. Their number and amounts are not specified.

Recently, Facebook restricted the page of Ukrainian Pravda after it published information about fundraising for the rehabilitation of "Azov" fighters who returned from captivity.

Ukrainian journalists and opinion leaders have repeatedly complained about the blocking of social media pages owned by the Meta company due to anti-war posts. This was reported by journalists Sonia Koshkina and Arkadiy Babchenko, singer Olya Polyakova, the host of Television Toronto Yaroslava Kravchenko and others.

Also, the page of the Association of Families of Defenders of Azovstal was repeatedly sanctioned. In September, the patronage service of the "Azov" regiment was blocked on social networks.

The Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine is trying to influence the rules of moderation of Ukrainian content in Meta social networks. Mykhailo Fedorov, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation, wrote an open letter to the company. According to the ministry, content is blocked due to automatic algorithms, "poor moderation" and excessive activity of Russian bots that complain about publications.

Currently, there is a huge scandal in Bulgaria on the same topic as well. Last year, it was officially announced that TELUS had been hired by Facebook to moderate the content of Bulgarian users on the platform.

Before this became public information, TELUS was suspected of bias towards certain political parties and movements. Often, profiles with posts against Putin and Russia get blocked much faster than those with pro-Russian propaganda. Other accusations point to a political bias towards the third GERB government. Others notice that posts criticizing Kostadin Kostadinov (far-right, pro-Putin Vazrazhdane) are being taken down, instead of his for "trichane of dogs" (a ‘ritual’ which is considered by many animal cruelty).

Such trends have fueled doubts over the past year about the adequacy of TELUS's moderation and whether the company really does adhere to certain ideologies.

A few weeks ago, BIRD.BG media published an accusatory post on Facebook after the media's editor-in-chief Atanas Chobanov's Facebook account was restricted. His profile was restricted for 30 days after sharing news that the European Parliament had designated Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.

The post aims to expose some of those working at TELUS. The media accuses them of bias towards Russia, as well as a lack of adequate assessment of publications with hate speech. The media threatened that they already have the coordinates of some employees and are ready to "bathe them in the people's love."

An investigation of BIRD.BG showed that an operations manager at TELUS is married to a certain person who posted in a T-shirt with a “Moscow” sign on it and put the Russian flag on his profile as a sign of support to Russia two days after the start of the war in Ukraine. Some media organizations have criticized BIRD.BG’s post which incites hatred against TELUS employees while the company itself issued a statement that it supports its employees by any means possible and has taken the necessary legal steps against BIRD.BG.