Facebook is actively removing postings I'm making today. I maintain a foothold on Facebook, knowing its tawdriness and that it's no friend to progressive politics, because I oversee a family history-DNA project that's housed there. And Facebook is one way I can keep in quick touch with a wide circle of relatives and friends.
First posting removed today: Jess Piper's graphic (below) about white women voting in this election.
@wdlindsy I posted the image with only “FYI” as the text above.
@AlliFlowers Please let me know if FB takes it down. I posted it with no comment at all — only the image.
@wdlindsy I definitely will.
you're not wrong. I posted a comical sign taken from an American Indian group off of Threads, and FB took it down twice. Here's what it said:
(Indian Face on top) INDIAN PARKING ONLY. ALL OTHERS NEED A RESERVATION
I loved it and shared it for my followers in My Stories. Twice they took it down, but so far it has survived when I shared it to my FB page and typed: This is comedy. Don't take it down.
@BillMcGuire They don’t understand humor. @wdlindsy
plus I took it from an American Indian page on Threads
@BillMcGuire @AlliFlowers Unfortunately, I had no choice: Facebook itself took that posting down and immediately removed another one of mine yesterday, informing me after that that I have various penalties leveled against my account until November 19. Interesting, isn't it, that that time frame silences me until two weeks after the election? I've never had this happen before with my Facebook account. People say it's "just" the algorithm, but more is at work here than that.
My personal belief is that Zuckerberg is behind it showing off his true colors, that he wants to eliminate views he personally doesn't believe in or that he believes might hurt him with trump. He came out weeks ago declaring he was some sort of weird name politically now. Never seen it before; perhaps he made it up, but since then I think he ordered his peeps to thwart anti-trump, anti-Republican views. Best wishes to you.
@BillMcGuire @AlliFlowers That sounds correct to me — behind it, as in setting policies for the entire organization.
And the use of algorithms and how FB chooses to censor or not censor is all deliberately shrouded in mystery, deliberately opaque. There's not even a clear way to protest when something you've posted is taken down. In some cases, I've simply had a notice that a posting was removed, and the notice does not even tell me what the posting was.
@AlliFlowers Please let me know. I'd be curious. In the 2016 election cycle, any time I posted anything with the phrase "white evangelicals," Facebook yanked it. People told me this was "just" the algorithm at work, but I think there's inbuilt censorship that also targets certain people's accounts if others have complained and reported to try to shut them down.