Meta’s Copyright System Is Being Weaponized Against Albanian Protesters

European lawmakers are calling for an investigation into Meta after the mass suspension of accounts posting about anti-government protests in Albania, in what observers believe is a coordinated brigading attack.

“What happened in Albania is tantamount to censorship,” said MEP Alexandra Geese in a statement. She is one of more than 30 Members of the European Parliament who signed a letter asking the European Commission to investigate whether Meta's actions complied with the EU's Digital Services Act.

“Mark Zuckerberg’s understanding of ‘freedom of speech’ only seems to cover opinions that align with the political agenda of the Trump administration. This is precisely why we have European rules,” she added.

The “Flamingo Revolution” protests, initially sparked by the development of a luxury resort linked to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, have been taking place daily in the Albanian capital for over three months, demanding changes in the law that allows development on protected land as well as the resignation of the country’s prime minister. The Meta account suspensions almost all appear to be the result of copyright complaints and appear to have begun in late August.

An NGO group investigating the Meta suspensions alleges to WIRED it has evidence that “strongly indicates coordinated activity” led to the complaints.

“What quickly distinguished this from ordinary content moderation was the concentration of cases around the same political and civic movement,” said Martha Dimitratou, founder of Repro Uncensored, a nonprofit organization that tracks digital censorship. In at least one case, the complaint was traced to someone who claimed they had been paid to make the complaint.

Dimitratou told WIRED they had verified around 100 cases of account restrictions connected to protests. “We continue to receive additional reports and, based on the volume and patterns we are seeing, estimate that the true number could be several hundred,” she says.

“We also identified that multiple posts on an account would receive copyright complaints, often five to 10 in a relatively short period, followed by escalating enforcement and, in some cases, the disabling of the entire account,” Dimitratou says. “Taken together, the alleged paid reporting, the repeated sequence of copyright complaints followed by account enforcement, the concentration of targets around the same movement, and the repeated targeting of replacement accounts strongly indicate coordinated activity,” Dimitratou added.

Repro Uncensored found that nearly all affected accounts appeared to be targeted with reports of copyright infringement. In at least 70 cases, the group confirmed removal of posts and videos about the protests, account restrictions, and loss of collaboration features.

“Collectively, the targeted accounts reach millions of people, meaning that when they are restricted or removed, millions can lose access to news, political information, protest documentation, and civic voices they rely on,” Dimitratou says.

One protester told WIRED that the person reporting his account said they had been paid to conduct the attack. On August 20, Arjan Koçi began receiving an influx of emails from Meta. “Someone was claiming that I had taken their work and published it as mine. But it was my video, my voice, my picture,” says Koçi, a British-Albanian who had been documenting the protest on his Instagram account since June.

Koçi’s aerial drone footage showed the massive scale of the demonstrations in Tirana and got millions of views across platforms. “If you receive too many of these reports, Meta will restrict your account,” he told WIRED. Around the same time, he said, several other protesters were also facing similar reports against their accounts. “It was about 1 o'clock in the morning, and I know at least 20 accounts that were closed at the same time,” he said.

“This tactic of mass copyright reporting, commonly called brigading, is an abuse of the systems that Meta has in place for people to report genuinely problematic, abusive, dangerous, or illegal content on their platforms,” said Kian Vesteinsson, deputy director for tech policy and digital rights research at Freedom House. “We've even seen this sort of brigading happen at scale in the context of a war or a conflict. Certainly, it's a tactic that we saw carried out by the Myanmar military, for example, to go after people criticizing the government's conduct,” he told WIRED.

Five of the reports made against Koçi’s content came from the same source with the same email address. He decided to reach out to the complainant. “I told him, ‘You have made a mistake; you are claiming my work as yours. Why are you doing this?’”

To his surprise, Koçi received a response. “He asked for my contact and then texted me.” The person told Koçi that he had been paid $1,800 to report these accounts and would withdraw his complaints if Koçi paid him. “He said he would accept crypto as payment.”

When Koçi refused, the person shared a piece of advice: “If you want to keep your account safe, deactivate it for a week.” Further attempts to contact the alleged attacker were met with silence. They did not respond to WIRED's attempts to contact them.

“Our research has found that copyright claims can trigger enforcement more readily than many other forms of reporting,” said Dimitratou, adding that often multiple complaints are deliberately directed at the same account, making them vulnerable to automated suspensions.

“The fundamental vulnerability is that a bad actor does not need to hack an account or directly prevent someone from publishing. They can weaponize the platform’s own enforcement infrastructure by falsely claiming ownership of material and repeatedly reporting,” Dimitratou said.

Vesteinsson told WIRED there was an additional vulnerability, in that “US-based platforms follow US copyright law. And specifically, the copyright framework set out under the DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. And the DMCA has a notice-and-takedown provision that tends to favor overcompliance,” he said.

A Meta spokesperson told WIRED that the accounts were removed in error and have been restored, without commenting on the investigation. “We're sorry for the inconvenience caused. We have an appeals process for people to use when they think we've made a mistake, so we can restore content if we determine it doesn’t violate.”

The source of attacks remains unclear. Koci and others have accused the Albanian government of orchestrating attacks. “They want to close the protest down because this protest is one of the biggest protests in 35 years,” he said.

Albanian prime minister Edi Rama has rejected the accusations. “We have nothing whatsoever to do with any social media account being disabled or restricted, nor do we possess the technical capability to carry out an operation of this kind. Shame on this whole bunch of failures for spreading such nonsense,” he said on X. The prime minister's office did not respond to WIRED's request for comment.

While Koçi’s account has since been restored, he said he still believes he is shadow banned.

European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier confirmed in a press briefing that the commission is already investigating Meta over concerns relating to the shadow banning of political voices and said the latest allegations were “definitely not a surprise.” The commission confirmed that the investigation is ongoing and highlighted the role of the Digital Services Act in enabling users to challenge unjustified content moderation decisions.