Facebook

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.

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.