More than 30 MEPs ask the Commission to investigate Meta's copyright takedowns in Albania

The complaint against Arjan Koçi said his own drone footage belonged to someone else. "Someone was claiming that I had taken their work and published it as mine. But it was my video, my voice, my picture," Koçi told WIRED ^[8]. He is a British-Albanian who had been documenting the demonstrations on his Instagram account since June, and his aerial shots of the crowds in Tirana had picked up millions of views across platforms ^[7][9]. The emails from Meta started on August 20 ^[7]. "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 ^[10].

"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 that tracks digital censorship ^[11]. She described the sequence to WIRED: "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" ^[12]. At five to 10 complaints each across the roughly 100 restricted accounts her group has verified, the campaign needed somewhere between 500 and 1,000 individual reports ^[13].

Inside a review queue, a stack of complaints against one account looks like information about that account, and the pattern that separates a brigade from a real dispute only shows up across accounts. "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 said ^[14]. Her group verified the 100-account figure itself; the number does not come from Meta ^[3].

Kian Vesteinsson, deputy director for tech policy and digital rights research at Freedom House, said 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" ^[15]. He told WIRED the tactic turns up in conflicts as well: "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" ^[16].

The letter moves the argument off Meta's own appeal path and onto the Commission's desk. "What happened in Albania is tantamount to censorship," MEP Alexandra Geese said in a statement ^[5]. "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 ^[6].

Two questions sort any report lane: what it costs a stranger to file, and what a wrong call costs the person reported. Copyright answers badly on both counts for a protest documentarian. Filing is free, and the penalty lands on reach before anyone watches the video. A team running that intake does not have to wait for Brussels to find out whether the copyright queue can see patterns across accounts at all, or whether a filer with no history can push an account up the escalation ladder on their own. "If you receive too many of these reports, Meta will restrict your account," Koçi said ^[17].