Category: Social Media

Facebook, You’re Stupid

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date October 3, 2021

I received my second Facebook jail term this weekend. Why? Because I told the person who wrote a comment promoting horse deworner to cure COVID that I reported their comment for spreading misinformation.

Then I committed the crime: I said the comment was stupid.

For my crime I’m in Facebook jail, while the misinforming comment remains. What’s bitterly ironic is the misinforming comment was to an ABC news story about a young woman who died of COVID because she was misinformed about the ‘dangers’ of the COVID vaccination.

(Do you think Facebook appreciates the irony? Do you think ‘irony’ is among Facebook’s terms that automatically get you banned?)

Why do we continue with these social media companies? At one point in time, all we needed was a weblog like this one or one hosted at Blogger or Radio Userland, and an RSS reader. The conversations were smarter, and the bullshit ruthlessly and surgically removed.

We owned our spaces. We still own our spaces but they’re mighty quiet nowadays, because all the action is on Facebook, Twitter, or whatever is the ‘gee wiz’ site loaded with influencers most of us would have considered too vapid for words years ago.

The only reason I stay on Facebook is because it allows me to connect with people I really like. And I should limit my Facebook interactions solely to my friends, because the third time I respond to someone spreading misinformation about COVID (or a certain election), I’ll probably get banned for life.

I won’t refrain from giving my honest opinion about their comments. They’re stupid. Just like Facebook.

Update

Timing is everything.

Last night, 60 Minutes had an interview with Frances Haugen, Facebook whistleblower who provided several documents to the Wall Street Journal for a damning series on the company.

The following is particularly relevant…especially in light of the fact that, at the end of my Facebook jail term, the comment noted above and others I reported for spreading COVID misinformation still have not been removed.

Neither has the direct threat against my friend Dori’s life in a Facebook post. This, even though several of us have reported an obviously blatantly violent comment.

Facebook seems to have no problem with blatantly violent threats.

Tags Facebook

Banned on Facebook

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date October 26, 2020

I posted a comment to the Savannah Morning News Facebook page about the COVID virus. A person responded to my comment, saying only the “old and fat” die from the ‘hoax’ virus, and good riddance to them.

I responded that they were an ugly person to have such views. The comment was blocked, and now I’m banned for commenting or posting for 24 hours (I haven’t a clue what the June post was about*).

Facebook is failing. Facebook is failing badly. It looks at words, in isolation, rather than concepts or phrases, because it doesn’t want to hire people who can actually determine what is or is not acceptable. And it bends over backwards to protect the worst of the dregs of society that habituate the pages, because, frankly, they generate the most income for Zuckerberg.

There have been times when I’ve allowed my passion to run away with me, and I’ve been downright nasty to folks. In those cases, I would have understood a ban. But in those cases, I didn’t use a combination of words that triggered some obviously primitive filters. As someone who has worked with semantics on the web (RDF), and computational linguistics, I assume that the filters use some combination of “you” or “you’re” and then a number of adjectives like “ugly” in that order and that’s sufficient.

But think about the context. I was responding to a person who is saying “good riddance” to over 220,000 dead people** but I’m the one banned. What a profound fail.

The lesson from all of this kiddies is to verbally eviscerate people, but use big words and complex thoughts so you don’t trigger the ban filters. However, just be aware when it comes to people you’re responding to, big words and complex thoughts will most likely sail right over their heads.

So maybe the key takeaway is just to ignore the people. Ultimately, this is the response that will hurt them the most.

* I remembered. I was talking about ‘white racists’ and evidently that was a racist thing to say and the post was banned.

** And I will continue calling people who say good riddance to 220,000 people ‘ugly’. Because they are.

Tags Facebook

Social Media Technology

Brought to you by HTTPS

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date September 19, 2017

As you can see when you access this page, I’ve made the move to HTTPS. I detail the experience at my new technology-only site, Shelley’s Toy Box.

I upgraded my server before I made the move, and eliminated all the cruft. I also moved my DNS records over to my name registrar, rather than manage on the server.

All in all, the experience was challenging at times, but also interesting. It was fun tweaking with the tech, and I need to do more tech tweaking in the future.

One of the downsides to the move is removing my archived statically generated HTML pages. I now get, on average, over seven hundred 404 requests a day. The numbers will go down as I gradually add the older content into this site, and as search engines drop references to the missing pages. Still, I feel like one big link black hole right now.

The Wayback Machine is extremely helpful when it comes to recovering pages that, for whatever reason, I don’t have backups for. I even found a link to my earliest weblog, a Manila site, hosted by Dave Winer and Userland. I was excited when I found the link. My reactions to the events of 9/11 were recorded in my Manila weblog, and I don’t have a backup of the old posts.

I could have dropkicked Dave Winer when I discovered all the pages have the same message:

Your crawler is hitting our servers too hard. Please slow down, it’s hurting the service we provide to our customers. Thanks. webmaster@userland.com.

Thankfully most of the pages for my many other sites and weblogs are intact. When I restore a page, I try to include a link to the Wayback Machine archive page, because the site also archived the comments.

Seriously, if you’re not donating to the Internet Archive, you should think about starting. It’s our history.

Tags Google, weblog

Social Media Technology

Facebook’s astonishing fail

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date June 12, 2015

update

I did find a reference to this type of behavior…from 2010.

What I suspect happened is some very old security code accidentally got compiled into the Facebook server app, in relation to the company’s new security feature, and I just happened along when it was exposed.

Either that, or I stumbled into a time vortex.

earlier

I treated myself to a new smartphone today. Among the apps I loaded was Facebook. I had copied my password from Dashlane and was ready to go, when I ran into something new:

Facebook’s new security system.

To prove I am who I am, Facebook displayed a set of images, each with a set of names, and asked me to pick the person who matched the image. OK, this ought to be good.

The first was an obviously 30+ year old photo of a chubby baby. So who is it?

I’d have a hard time recognizing one of my own baby pictures, much less the folks on Facebook. Especially considering many people, such as myself, don’t even use photos of themselves as their Facebook profile pictures. So, next image, please.

The next showed a cartoon strip, with a square around one of the panels. The security question then asked who the image was. I can tell you that it isn’t Barbara Schmitz or Nanny Baker.

The third showed an image I did recognize: Mr. Presidential Candidate Rand Paul. Which means it wasn’t Kevin Stamps or John Doppler.

The thing that saved me was when another photo of a woman looked like Sarah Barnett. Thankfully, Sarah also had a conference pass around her neck with “Sarah Barnett” printed on it. But by that time, I’d taken too long or missed too many images, or some such thing, so I had to start over.

Facebook…you’ve taken “being completely unaware of how people use your web site” to a level never before heard of, or seen. And then you exceeded it by using your complete lack of understanding to form the platform for your new security system.