When you write this, is that in reference to this statement that you are interpreting as meaning that?:
I’m not certain what you mean by there being a suggestion in that to “put together” flagger with flagee(s), if you are talking about user accounts on the same site that can already communicate directly.
Would agree that protecting anonymity of who is filling flag reports from who is being flagged is a good practice generally, if that is what you mean.
Basically, yes.
It’s entirely possible I misinterpreted what @anon36555649 meant with,
If the intended meaning wasn’t something along the lines of, “[the flagger] talking [perhaps through, or accompanied by, a mediator] with the person/account that is being flagged about what is causing [the flagger] to flag things that other folks don’t agree need flags”, then I apologize for having misunderstood.
And on a well-moderated Discourse forum, that’s probably workable as a firebreak.
(The rest of this is somewhat off-topic, since it’s about Facebook, not Discourse. But I do think it’s valuable to have a picture of how things work on other sites — particularly in the areas where they have problems.)
Flag-gaming became a big problem on Facebook primarily because of its scale and its tiny moderator:user ratio.
Because there are so few, incredibly overloaded moderators just trying to keep their heads above water against the endless deluge of flagging and other moderation activity, automated decisions will frequently go unreviewed, if not indefinitely (though, without the flaggee submitting a direct appeal, probably indefinitely), then at least long enough to make the ultimate review outcome irrelevant.
Conversations on Facebook, like on Twitter, tend to be relatively short-lived. You don’t get threads like this one, that’s ebbed and flowed for 4 years already. On mass-market social media, when someone posts on a topic, that post will reach 95% of the feeds it’s ever going to reach within a few hours, maybe a day or two at most. The conversations that spring up in replies/comments might have a slightly longer tail, but still the bulk of activity dies down pretty quickly. The Feed™ marches relentlessly onward.
So, when flag-gamers are able to trigger an automatic takedown of a post, it doesn’t really matter if a human reviewer ultimately restores it, unless that restoration happens quickly enough for it to still be part of the conversation.
A post that’s restored a week after it was taken down may just as well have never existed. By that time, the conversation has died down, people’s attention has moved elsewhere, and the falsely-flagged post gets restored to a forum with no remaining audience.
The apparent aim of the flagging (to get the post taken down) is ultimately unsuccessful. But the flaggers have actually succeeded in their real goal: They’ve silenced the targeted post long enough for everyone to have stopped listening.
Granted, very few sites have as much activity to monitor as Facebook, and most sites can review moderation decisions in less than a week. But human review, while important, isn’t necessarily all that meaningful unless it’s also timely enough to matter.
That is profound, wow.
Lot of good reasons in what you wrote there to not use facebook, are there not even volunteer moderators for individual pages with that? Moderators on staff for a gigantic platform like that can’t really effectively moderate things that they aren’t even involved with at all would think.
The intent of flagging may not always be to just remove content, may be for if something is inaccurate or needs correction/clarification.