Ah, Thursday. It started with an NSF notice from my bank (they’ve had a $300 deposit since March 28, but they decided to hold onto it until today, I guess until it reached the peak of ripeness).
Then, a few minutes later, another lovely automated notice arrived on my phone, this time from the friendly folks at Facebook.
This is not my first Facebook infraction, of course, which is why I avoid using the service except for work-related postings.
So what pissed off the Facebook Police this time?
A link I posted in November of last year to the Kansas Reflector, a local non-profit news website that reported on a police raid of a small-town newspaper in Marion County, Kan.
The raid resulted in the death of the paper’s elderly co-owner. The paper’s staff has alleged that the search of their offices and homes, and the seizure of the paper’s computers, was politically motivated and arranged by the town’s now ex-police chief, in collusion with some prominent business owners and elected officials. The newspaper this week sued the police and local officials for $10 million.
Why in the world would Facebook say a link to that story violated community standards on cybersecurity?
I wondered if, perhaps, the Kansas Reflector’s website was taken over by hackers or their domain name was hijacked. Unfortunately, those things do happen to publishers. But I went to the Kansas Reflector‘s website, and the website works just fine; they weren’t hacked.
But what did I see prominently displayed on the front page? A story highly critical of Facebook:
Well, isn’t that a damned funny coincidence.
I checked in with a group of digital local journalists I know from around the country who were following the events in Kansas last year.
Guess what? Those who shared links to the Kansas Reflector tell me they also received notices that they had violated Facebook’s community standards; some were told they broke the policy on “cybersecurity,” and others said it was the policy on “spam.”
I also emailed the Kansas Reflector; they told me they are aware of the problem and learned about it when Facebook blocked them from sharing links to their own stories.
Why are Facebook and its bug-ridden community standards system suddenly blocking discussion of this topic?
Are they really so thin-skinned as to block criticism of their service by a local website in Kansas? (It’s hard to imagine any high-ups at Facebook care that much about a random opinion column. If so, how Elon Musk-like.)
If this was intentional retaliation (which I’ll admit seems weird), and not just some glitch, I would suspect some low-level Facebook drone got a little bit over-eager to please their bosses. (There are a lot of young nerds inside these social media companies who are absolutely fanatical about working for them.)
It’s also possible — more probable than the deliberate sabotage theory, I think — that friends of the people being sued this week are mass-reporting the links to the coverage as “possible spam,” which tripped some algorithmic warning mechanism at Facebook.
Again, the Facebook reporting mechanism is not transparent and is buggier than a used motel mattress.
Also a possibility: Someone (a rogue advertiser? a random hacker?) injected some malicious code into the Reflector’s website that is not being detected by humans, but it was picked up (even briefly) by Facebook’s scanners. The Reflector appears to run on WordPress, so that’s not beyond the realm of reason. (WordPress is vulnerable to all sorts of hacks.)
But then again, the Reflector says its website is fine.
Or maybe Facebook just glitched, as it’s wont to do, and ironically, it glitched on precisely this story on precisely this day. I’m willing to admit I may be veering into tinfoil hat territory, as journalism blogger Dan Kennedy suggested after I messaged him on Mastodon yesterday:
In the meantime, here’s a reminder: Facebook sucks. Its parent company, Meta Inc., which also owns Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp, also sucks.
Spammers, trolls, bots, literal Nazis, peddlers of conspiracy theories, and impersonators run rampant on Facebook — but ordinary people regularly find themselves blocked for violating Facebook’s weirdly vague and opaque “community standards.” It’s happened to me more than once.
There are many reasons not to want to use Meta’s products, but until the so-called fediverse becomes easier for non-nerds to navigate, it’s going to be hard to reach users who use Facebook/Instagram as their entire window to the world wide web and are reluctant to change — and ham-fisted Meta is exploiting that reluctance to leave the walled Facebook garden, ruthlessly but clumsily.
UPDATE: Syndicated editorial cartoonist Paul Berge also noticed this on Thursday. It wasn’t just links to that particular story that were blocked — it was all links to everything from the Kansas Reflector, some 6,000 stories in all. Like me, he finds it suspicious, at the very least:
To my mind, there is no coincidence that the Dave Kendall article complaining about Facebook was published the very morning that the Zuckerverse came crashing down on the Reflector.
UPDATE II: The Kansas Reflector has a story out about Facebook blocking their content. A Facebook spokesperson offered a response on X (not Facebook, ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, you can’t make it up, can you?) saying it was an accident and apologizing — but as of Thursday night, they still hadn’t fixed the problem, so just how sorry are they, really?
Facebook increasingly reminds me of the joke about the two little old ladies who have lunch at the same restaurant every day.
“I don’t know why we keep coming here — the food is terrible,” one lady says.
The second lady says, “Yes, and the portions are so small!”