It’s the strangest thing. You open your Facebook personal or group page and you see this message from FACEBOOK:
This particular removal was regarding an article I wrote for our local online publication regarding local election results and then shared on that publication’s Facebook pages and with people who are friends and acquaintances. Facebook’s explanation?
Yes, that’s right. The post I put up there for an article I wrote about local news is “SPAM” even though I don’t ask people to like a page to access the content on another site.
That’s not the craziest one I have seen. A friend shared this today:
Because she got a lot of “Happy Birthday” wishes, Facebook thought she was sending SPAM. Wait a minute, doesn’t FACEBOOK actually remind subscribers to wish their friends “Happy Birthday”?
These are only two instances of this ridiculous restriction of people’s posts. One friend got cautioned for posting a picture of a cross. Another got in trouble for thanking people for saying “Happy Birthday.”
Of course, many are censored for other reasons like political statements or ideology and that is bound to ramp up as we get closer to the Election in November. Many of us were victims of censorship in 2020 when Facebook decided that no one could discuss the origins of Covid, the dangers of the vaccine, or remedies like Ivermectin. I personally spent 90 days in Facebook “jail” for saying something that involved those topics.
And let’s not even try to address the stupid fact checks that happen every time one posts a joke about a topic Facebook considers “sensitive” or your meme posts a quote from a politician that the fact checkers think you are misinterpreting.
You can ask for a review of your content, but you can’t ever talk to an actual person or even state your case. Everything is done by some bizarre protocol that you really cannot fight.
Many of my friends and colleagues suggest it’s time to get off this platform. In reality, it has become a site that younger people avoid at all costs. Maybe they know something we don’t know.
Perhaps it really is time for many of us to leave this social media site that adds very little to our lives and sucks up too much of our time and attention. META spends most of the time of its employees (or AI) finding reasons to shut us down. Maybe its usefulness for posting cute cat, dog and children’s photos is diminished. After all, Facebook might call it SPAM.
