Spherical Model: Ironic Timing

I’ve been writing this blog since March 2011. I’ve written over 1400 posts. I never got censored—until last month, when my December 7 post was taken down by Blogger. It was about the House report on the response to that illness I guess I’m not supposed to talk about, even though I was referring to the findings of a government committee (and even though I had literally written freely on the issue dozens of times since 2020).

For many years I have followed up my posts here with a post on Facebook linking to it, to make it more convenient for friends to find what I’ve written.

I had a sense I’d been shadow banned a couple of times on Facebook, but no way to prove it. I don’t spend a lot of time (any) trying to get engagement, so if there’s less, I could hardly tell. Sometimes those little notices showed up, warning people about possible misinformation, with a link to some “trusted” source—which, as a result of that House report, we now know was actually a link to propagandistic misinformation. But Facebook had never given me a warning or taken down a post. Until last Friday.

I wrote about the enumerated powers in the US Constitution. I’ve written about that a number of times before. Talking about what’s in the Constitution seems pretty safe from violating “community standards.” I posted late in the evening on January 2. Facebook immediately removed it and told me I had violated community standards. They didn’t say what specifically I had done. I clicked, to see if they would tell me more, before I had taken a screenshot, which I regret. I was just so surprised. So I may have missed a clue.

I protested that I had not violated community standards and asked for a review. They said they would get back to me, and that usually takes 4 days, but could be longer. Today makes a full week. There is no word. There is no way, that I have discovered, to find out anything about the post. My account has no strikes against it and is in good standing, it appears.

I have read through the community standards. I cannot find anything that I may have violated, even inadvertently.

One thing I have noticed, just the past month or two, is a change in other accounts on Facebook that link to outside content. I first noticed it with Dinesh D’Souza, and later with various people from the Daily Wire—Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles. I’m sure there are others doing it. (Maybe everyone else got a memo that I didn’t.) They make a statement, just words on a colored background. And you have to click on comments to get a link to the linked material. I find this really annoying. You can’t even get the title of what is being linked to until you go to the comments, so you don’t know if it’s worth it. Sometimes you don’t get a full idea of what the content is about until you click through to the actual linked article, which is only worth it if you really trust the source and seek more of their content.

I see no advantage to the content provider—unless it is to avoid some obscure (unfindable) Facebook rule about linking to somewhere beyond Facebook. One would think that, when you’re on another platform, and it asks you if you want to share, and Facebook comes up as one of the buttons to make that easy, that it would mean Facebook is good with sharing such content, assuming it doesn’t violate their other community standards, many of which are reasonable to avoid theft, fraud, libel, child exploitation, and other actual crimes.

Ironically, Mark Zuckerberg announced just this week, Tuesday, January 7, that they are removing their fact checkers, and letting go of the whole censorship gig they’ve been providing for the current regime. He doesn’t sound like he’s crazy, or lying. I guess we'll see.

Mark Zuckerberg makes announcement about
changes to Facebook. Screenshot from here.

Here are the things he listed that Facebook/Meta is going to do:

1. Remove fact checkers; replace them with Community Notes, similar to X. [I found a description of Community Notes here.]

2. Simplify content policies; get rid of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.

3. Change enforcement policies; no longer filter for any and all policy violations; focus on illegal and high severity violations; no action on lower severity violations until someone reports an issue.

4. Bring back civic content; this means political content can be recommended again, because people are ready to see this content again. [I’d like to say more about this overt censorship, which he seems comfortable with doing, based on their subjective sense of what people want to see, but maybe I’ll save that for another time.]

5. Move US-based content review to Texas, rather than in California, where bias has been an issue. [The next day there was a surprise announcement to PolitiFact that Facebook would no longer be using them; that means huge layoffs for them. I’m not particularly sad for them.]

6. Work with President Trump to push back on pressure to censor in other countries. While the US is the most pro-free-speech nation, with the Biden administration pushing for more censorship, other countries have been emboldened. There’s hope for support from Trump.

I guess things will be phased in. As of today, the community standards still say you can’t say anything against any kind of jab, because they want to uphold their certain beliefs (which, as I said, Facebook never actually censored me for; only Blogger, a Google platform, did that). I don't know about other topics.

I did a little research, to see if censoring linked content was a thing. Linked content is a problem. Facebook, and for that matter pretty much any platform, wants users to stay on the platform. But their practice has been to demote the content, with an algorithm, so it gets seen by fewer people. Not surprising, actually. Facebook has taken that further by sometimes adding a warning, such as, “Are you sure you want to follow this link?” as though wherever you’re going might be a threat to your computer safety. (It tends to work; many people see that and think, “I don’t want to risk it.”) But I didn’t find anything to say that they actually removed your content for having an external link in it.

Putting the link in the comments is indeed a way to “hide” the external link. And I think that will have to be what I do in the future. However, the drawback is that phone users have a harder time accessing the comments. So it’s a tradeoff: use a link and get fewer views (or in my case, get the post removed entirely), or put the link in comments and make it harder for people to view it.

If I’m wrong and my “violation” wasn’t the external link, but was content related, I don’t know how to solve that. Do they really find a discussion of the enumerated powers of the Constitution a risk to public safety? It may be that fact checkers actually do believe that.

In case you read here regularly, in late October I wrote a piece about the death throes of the "propaganda beast." I got censored after that, on two platforms that had not censored me before. So was I wrong? I don't think so. I think this is just part of the thrashing out of a cornered, dying beast.

There’s a fact checker (not used by Facebook) that I actually refer to frequently, called JustFacts. They back up what they say with data and, well, just facts. (As a result, they do appear to lean conservative.) Yesterday’s (January 9th) email included a response to the Mark Zuckerberg news, with links to 21 fact checker fails. I’ll include that portion of their email below, along with the links:

Facebook’s “Fact Checkers”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook is “going to get rid of fact checkers” because they have “been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created.”

For years, Just Facts has been documenting that Facebook-approved fact checkers like PolitiFact have incessantly spread falsehoods that support left-wing agendas. Here’s 21 glaring examples and the actual facts that refute them:

1) Covid-19 death rate

2) Market value of Mar-a-Lago

3) Biden’s role in the murder of Laken Riley

4) Income taxes paid by illegal immigrants

5) Late-term abortions

6) mRNA Covid vaccines

7) Violent crime trends

8) Effects of the federal “assault weapons” ban

9) Democrat Party’s role in the Ku Klux Klan

10) Impact of Obamacare on Medicare

11) Tax rates paid by the wealthy

12) Child hunger rates