Meta Reinstates Romanian Christian Outlet After Conservative Legal Pressure

Meta reinstated the Romanian Tribune’s Facebook page, ending a six-month suspension that saw the Christian newspaper accusing the platform of censorship, even as Meta blamed an errant automated flag.

The Christian Romanian diaspora outlet was removed in October 2024 after Meta’s systems flagged its administrators for “inauthentic activity,” a company spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation — a designation Meta now attributes to a mistaken reading of their physical locations. The page was reinstated after the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a conservative legal group, issued a demand letter arguing the takedown violated Meta’s own terms of service.

“We are grateful that Meta has taken this step,” Mercer Martin, legal counsel at ADF, told the DCNF. “They have resolved disputes amicably with us in the past, and so we think this is really a positive step forward for them, and we think it demonstrates a renewed commitment to freedom of expression that Mark Zuckerberg expressed earlier this year.”

ADF said the Tribune, whose Facebook page has about 6,100 followers, lost most of its traffic during the suspension, which began without warning and showed no community standards violations. Tribune editors attempted to appeal the enforcement decision multiple times using Meta’s internal tool, only to see the appeal button vanish from their interface, according to the ADF. The legal group’s April 14 letter to Meta’s legal team, obtained by the DCNF, claimed breach of contract and hinted at litigation if the account wasn’t restored.

“We reached out to Meta and explained that [its] action here wasn’t just an ethnical problem of a violation of freedom of expression, but also a violation of the law,” Martin said. “And then after conversations with them and a review of the account, they reinstated it … The Romanian Tribune had always followed Facebook’s community standards.”

Meta restored the account Monday and now says its enforcement system misidentified the Tribune’s location data, wrongly flagging the page for inauthentic behavior.

“This Page was mistakenly removed due to a technical error, unrelated to any content issues, and has since been restored. We’ve been clear that we’ve made too many enforcement mistakes and have been taking steps to correct that,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to the DCNF.

The company added that its internal systems logged the page’s administrators as operating from unusual geographic locations, tripping an automatic deactivation that was only reversed after the ADF’s intervention. Meta did not elaborate further on the technical details, nor did it comment on past content removals referenced in ADF’s complaint.

The Tribune had previously been flagged for posts on topics including COVID-19 and a Romanian referendum on traditional marriage, according to ADF. Those takedowns, Martin said, also lacked clear explanation and never resulted in visible strikes against the account.

“These removals were blatantly viewpoint discriminatory,” Martin said. “They were often about COVID, for example, not spreading misinformation, but critical of government. And then articles about a gay marriage referendum in Romania were removed. So Meta was really targeting political speech by then.”

On behalf of @LifeNewsHQ, its CEO @StevenErtelt, and potential adoptive mom Abby Covington, we sent a letter to @Meta demanding it lift the wrongful suspensions of these accounts after making free speech promises.

“Facebook needs to keep the momentum going. If Zuckerberg wants… pic.twitter.com/4cJHh8ylkC

— Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal) January 9, 2025

This marks another example of ADF’s increasingly aggressive approach to pushing back on social media censorship of its clients. ADF played a central role in pushing IBM to revise its advertising rules in April and has successfully lobbied for reinstatements of other conservative pages, including LifeNews and several pro-life pregnancy centers.

The reinstatement follows Meta’s recent moves to address over-enforcement. Martin acknowledged the company’s track record is imperfect but credited it with correcting course.