The question was serious. Malicious actions could certainly include propaganda operations and indeed there has been a growing investment across social networks to block content specific to certain ideas considered dangerous, disinformation and misinformation.
My guess is actually that, yes, this system has rules (and gets live feeds of them) to block certain political content associated with influence operations. But I was hoping to get a more serious, direct and charitable answer from someone who works on the system.
I'm also waiting for more commentary to this original question. I would wager that no it is not possible to detect propaganda effectively. Effective propaganda notably presents only one side to the story and uses various other tactics to send that message home but detecting one-sided but factual statements is impossible with today's natural language processing tools, as they struggle enough with being able to make sense of anything.
On another note, what happens if Facebook is able to detect "propaganda content" but it only silences propaganda it doesn't like? This is what I originally meant.
It's similar to how propaganda works in US media. It's not the news stories themselves, it's all about the news networks which are told from above which stories to run. I can see Facebook operating in a similar fashion today or in the future.
Definitely not all strategic communications could be detected and blocked. However some research has been tasked on the issue. Take "Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities" (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.00680v1.pdf). This paper, though it terms it 'antisocial', studies online influence operations and is mentioned on NATO's propaganda ("strategic communication") centre for excellence Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/StratComCOE).
The point of having a rule set that can be pushed to like the system described here is that it can be fed information from a centralized task force. Indeed, these systems are used across industries with patterns and rules to detect malware, hacking, and a host of other activity (using formats such as STIX or TAXI).
It's unlikely that Facebook itself would be trying to determine whether a post to some content is propaganda - it's more likely that their automated system will apply the rules it receives from information defense agencies.
As per your other note, the selective censorship of information is absolutely a form a propaganda of its own. Facebook (and the US government) don't have the best history here and have 100% certifiably censored information to prevent effective organization of (for example) May Day protests. I'm not going to go speak about that at length here - hoping to get some technical clarity from those involved.
