On December 13, 2022, a group of Bulgarian activists from the nonprofit United Bulgaria For One Cause (BOEC) tried to enter the offices of Telus International, a global outsourcing company that handles content moderation for Meta, in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia. Live on Facebook, they came armed with printouts of posts and accounts they said had been removed from the platform, which they stuck to the office doors, Wired.com reports.

“We used stickers to symbolically close the doors of Telus, symbolic like they closed our accounts,” Orlin Ezekiev, a member of BOEC, says.

BOEC accuses Telus International of blocking posts that criticize Russia and support Ukraine. Their protest came weeks after a local outlet, Bird.bg, published allegations—which Telus International denies—that the outsourcing company was working with pro-Russian oligarchs to silence pro-Ukrainian sentiment on the platform. The website also posted the names and images of Telus International employees on its Facebook page.

Criticism of Telus International and Meta in Bulgaria reached such a height that the outsourcing company’s chief corporate officer, Marilyn Tyfting, was called to testify in front of the Bulgarian parliament on January 26. “I would also like to confirm that Telus International does not set content review policies. Instead we apply the policies of our clients and comply with applicable laws,” she said in a prepared statement. On February 1, Meta published a blog post responding to claims of pro-Russian bias in its content moderation, calling the accusations “false” and saying “there is no evidence to support them.”

However, experts who monitor Russian attempts to manipulate the information space in Europe say that the truth is more complex. Russian propagandists and supporters of the Kremlin have become adept at abusing Meta’s moderation practices—which are less robust in non-English languages—by reporting content en masse to trigger reviews that could ultimately lead to its removal. The lack of transparency over what gets removed and why has created a sense of betrayal and frustration, which has in turn led pro-Ukraine activists to target the largely powerless moderators responsible for enacting Meta’s policies.

“Facebook is one of the main tools for promoting and silencing others at the same time,” says Ruslan Trad, a Sofia-based fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab. “Mass reporting is a very successful strategy.”

Trad, whose own Facebook account had once been suspended after being spuriously reported for hosting extremist content, says that pro-Russian groups will often organize on Telegram and choose which accounts or posts to report and get removed from Facebook. Some of these groups, according to Trad, operate from Russia, while others may be paid-for trolls from within Bulgaria, where labor is relatively cheap.

According to Todor Galev, director of research at the Center for the Study of Democracy, a European public policy think tank, the Atlantic Council’s Bulgarian Facebook page has been banned several times after being mass reported. He says the accounts of prominent pro-NATO and pro-EU journalists and media outlets have also been targeted.

“We suspect that Facebook relies mostly on algorithms for small markets like Bulgaria,” says Galev. “Because human moderation is very limited. There are only a few people working [on moderation] for Bulgaria.”

Just over half of Bulgaria’s 6.87 million people use Facebook, which is the dominant social platform in the country. Bulgaria has long been a target of Russian trolls and pro-Russian propaganda, particularly since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Both sympathetic local media and Russian disinformation operations have pushed a pro-Russia narrative, blaming the conflict on NATO.

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