Property Investor Chat Group NZ administrators said they had no warning from Meta. Photo: NIKOLAS KOKOVLIS / AFP
The country's biggest property investor chat group has become another casualty of Facebook's sweeping suspensions.
Property Investor Chat Group NZ had 73,000 members when it was suspended last week.
Its administrators said they had no warning.
"We are quite strict in regulating content to stay on topic," one of them, Nick Gentle, said.
"Avoid fights. Post approval to remove anything fishy, and members report anyone sharing dodgy links and those profiles get blocked, so I've no idea what rule we broke."
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'Sometimes Facebook will say 'we have removed content that went against our community guidelines' but you can never click in to see what it was to adjust your settings."
He said they were having trouble reaching someone at Facebook to find out what to do next.
If they could not save the page, they would have to start again, he said.
Group founder Graeme Fowler said it seemed the decision was made by AI.
Alex Sims, a University of Auckland professor in the department of commercial law, said people using tech platforms were generally at their mercy.
"Lots of people and groups get removed from Facebook with no warning. One reason can be Meta's use of AI, with no human in the loop reviewing the decision. [It] was a real issue earlier in the year, and the issue may still be occurring. There is an appeal process which should be initiated ASAP.
Alex Sims. Photo: Supplied
"Given the issues with Meta unilaterally removing groups, it might be a good idea to move to another platform that is not so trigger-happy and also has better privacy protection... The issue is that those other platforms are often not as user-friendly as Facebook and not so familiar for the group's members, so may be a steep learning curve for the admins and group members. "
RNZ has reported on a number of cases where people have had their social media accounts suspended without a clear reason.
Tens of thousands of people around the world signed a petition advocating for affected users, who said they had been silenced by Meta's "broken AI enforcement systems".
Facebook has been approached for comment.
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