Facebook Shenanigans – The cup runneth over

Updated 2019 02 04: Made an update that provides a little more information on FB shadow banning.

Facebook shadow-banning

If you wonder what shadow-banning is all about, this explains it, but it does not seem that switching to different social media is necessarily a remedy.  There is no remedy.

I am being shadow-banned by Facebook.  I just found another couple of instances and won’t even bother to look for more.  Right, I know what I will be doing about it, but I am sorry for having wasted far too much time on Facebook, and that hurts the most.

It is hard to tell – and not worth making a detailed analysis of (the evidence of it is overwhelming) – but I have the distinctive impression that I need to divorce myself from using Facebook.  Facebook quite simply violates too many of my community standards, and I cannot take it any longer.   Facebook censors, Facebook sabotages the exchanges of ideas that violate Facebook’s irrational, biased perceptions. The cup runneth over. I have had enough – ten years – of it.

This is the practical thing with biased perceptions: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The trick is to have all (or most) others see the same beauty that the promoter of it sees. That is the more likely to happen, the more intensively propagandists censor the ugly truth.

It is not that I cannot stand it anymore to be repeatedly put into “FB Jail.”  I only was there once, for about eight hours, while I know that others are being repeatedly barred from using Facebook for a month at a time (and even longer), for offences whose triviality boggles the mind.  Such people spend more time in than out of “FB Jail,” for no other reasons than that they don’t toe Facebook’s party line.  Nevertheless, Facebook routinely lets behaviour outside the norms of human decency go unpunished.

My blog category “Censorship” contains links to a number of articles I wrote over the last little while about such Facebook issues I experienced.  Here is an account of just three incidents, beginning Jan. 29, 2019.

A couple of days living with Facebook censorship

This is a story of what happened with FB censorship just the other day, in a two-day interval from Jan. 29 to 31, 2019.  I posted a link to a popular YouTube video.  The video has had over 8-million views.

When checking that posting just a little while later, 

I found that the YouTube screenshot for it, that FB had no problem displaying when I had posted it, was no longer visible in the FB display.  I followed the FB link to the video, to find out what had happened to it.  Well, look at how things can change in such a short time.  This is what I got:

However, when I access YouTube, I have no problem accessing the video at the URL that I had identified in the initial posting: “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuI6GTY9eVc”

Give it a try. Either just click on the preceding link or, if you are reading this in the FB discussion thread, use copy and paste commands for the URL enclosed by the quotation marks.  That will be necessary, when using FB, because just clicking on the link will lead you not to the video but to the erroneous notification about the copyright violation that FB makes sure you’ll get every time you click on the link that FB produced by appending a large number of characters to the original string for the link to the YouTube video I had identified in the original posting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwbKYcBdVyk&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1GolOZnnOCgLy0EJCSfR0iDehGM1C0FPO__667Py8a-FSBRFMJjCJaXjI  

The URL for that copyright-violation notification is obviously designed to make anyone but a determined reader give up on trying to access the YouTube video.  That is a scam and a fraud, but it is without a doubt effective in keeping a lot of people from wanting to try anything to watch the video, after they have been told that it is no longer accessible.

This is the second time that happened to me in the space of one day. The first time I noticed was when someone told me that another link I had identified returned a “Page not found” error message: It was this link:

» “Humanity Unbound: How Fossil Fuels Saved Humanity from Nature and Nature from Humanity”
Policy Analysis, No. 715, Cato Institute, Washington, DC
By Indur M. Goklany
“https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2194659” «

Again, in that case, too (in case you run into that problem when reading this on FB), using copy-and-paste commands for the character string that signifies the URL between the quotation marks works just fine and allows to gain access to the report by Indur Goklany. (The problem is, of course, that nothing tells what the original character string was for the URL I had posted, unless I become aware of the problem that FB caused and explain to people what they must do to circumvent the problem.)

When following the amended URL that FB used to replace the link I had posted, a notification will be displayed that contains a lie designed to turn people away from trying to access Indur Goklany’s report.  The amended URL substituted by FB is this: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2194659&fbclid=IwAR1PzZgtav5grsdL1GnihmtEgnbAFjem5ZLqA073Ux7BL4-Efj39vP-FXiw and produces this notification: 

That is a scam and a fraud.  The notification is a lie, a deliberate lie made by FB under false pretenses, but there is more.

Update 2019 01 31 9:25 a.m.

certainly, those three instances of Facebook censorship were discovered by accident.  It is possible, even likely, that there were more, perhaps quite a few more.  It has happened before that I found evidence of shadow banning on some posts I had made.  How can anyone be certain that all of what he posts to Facebook will actually be visible to any intended recipient?  I know that I can’t be.  Some of my FB post and comments were shadow-banned.

Update 2019 02 04

https://www.facebook.com/groups/Freegalitarians/

Paul, I just had a quick look at Freegalitarians. I used to see a lot of the notifications of new posts you made, but I don’t recall having seen any of those that were made since Jan 31.

I also noticed that the posts since Jan, 31 had no likes. That would suggest that no or few others saw notifications about your posts. My granddaughter is spending time in Hawaii with her husband and their son, She posted a few photos early this morning. Those photos had 42 likes and a lot of comments by 11:30 am. I am absolutely certain that she is not being shadow banned, while on a couple of occasions FB had shadow banned comments I had made at her FB timeline.

BTW, my granddaughter has half the number of FB friends I have, and her photos got far more likes and comments than all of your and my posts combined did today. Shadow banning works well, right?

_________

Tom, just for the record:

« Walter H. Schneider “Tom, how can her lawyer make a defence if he does not put up an argument like that?” To be clear, just in case someone else wonders, the mother you refer to is the one from Uganda who in London, England, cut her daughter so seriously (while mutilating her vagina) that she needed to be hospitalized.
The article reporting on the case mentions that the mother faces 14 years in prison. That is of course a ludicrous speculation. I’ll be very surprised if she spends any time in prison at all, regardless of what her lawyer states.
Here is the link “https://www.nst.com.my/…/mother-guilty-mutilating…” (between the quotation marks, in case FB mucks around with it).
_______
PS. Just for the record, the preview of the article got displayed after I pasted the link to the article. »

I thought of testing that comment right after I posted it. Sure enough, even though only a few seconds had gone by, after I posted the edited comment, the preview to the link is no longer shown.
It surprises me that I was made aware of that. That is uncharacteristically honest and, of course, not technically shadow banning. It is merely nothing more than plain, old, open, mundane censorship. 

How could I forget?! Of course, it is useless to post the link between quotation marks, because FB defaces it, in addition to corrupting the actual URL. So, just to be certain of how far FB’s censorship goes, Here is the link, (once more enclosed by quotation marks ): 

« Mother guilty of mutilating daughter in landmark female genital mutilation trial 

“https://www.nst.com.my/world/2019/02/456674/mother-guilty-mutilating-daughter-landmark-female-genital-mutilation-trial” »

There is little doubt in my mind that FB is becoming increasingly more user-unfriendly for exchanging information relating to the truth (or to satire, poking fun at politically correct, received wisdom).

If I see just a little more of that sort of sabotage, I’ll be leaving FB. Using FB has become quite simply too frustrating and aggravating.

I am sick and tired of having to explain link problems, postings that disappear without notice, or even having to worry about that not all is working as well with FB as it should.  

I am getting ready to stop using FB. It is simply too aggravating to be dealing constantly with FB’s shenanigans.

I will be setting up a discussion forum.  You may be interested. When it is ready, I will post a notification at this blog with a link (in the upper, right-hand corner of the web pages).  There will be no censorship, other than what is contained within the house rules.  Censorship has never been heavy before and will not be heavy now, but it will be a lot easier and more logical than what Facebook imposes.

If the blog loses a little traffic (a fraction of one percent) of what is coming to it from Facebook, that is not a problem.  It is a small price to pay for what I’ll save in effort and time to cope with FB problems.

PS. 2019 02 04:  The plan was to set up a discussion.  To get a discussion forum going is too big a job for me, the learning curve is steep.  I have the impression that I cannot get away with doing it using free software.  There is no way I can tell until I am done with it, but there is another, serious and insurmountable problem.

The process is complex, I have completed some of it, and with another week to two weeks of work I may be able to get it going satisfactorily and in a user-friendly fashion, but I would have to spend money to make it secure, and I won’t do that.  I may even have to hire someone to do that for me.  I will not let FB influence my life to that extent. 

The limit on what I spend on all of this was reached a long time ago.  If anyone wishes to have secure, uncensored discussions such as we had before FB came on the scene, then let’s go back to where we were when FB was not around.  If anyone wishes to get in touch with me by e-mail, then fine.  I can be contacted.  My website is still operational, and so is my blog.   Contact details are provided and accessible on both,

Phone me or write to me on FB, if you wish to have secure discussions, free of any interference by Facebook. FB will not let anyone have secure discussions, but so far I can use FB to tell people what to do to have secure discussions.

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#Censorship

See also:

• Is your website a “hate-site”? How do you know?
• Sniffing butts is impolite
• Freedom of expression vs Identity politics and censorship
• Speech codes limit the right to free speech
• Facebook : legislator, police, judge, jury, and jailer
• Facebook prevents posting of comments
• Turning moral traditions topsy-turvy
• Germany : Facebook censorship ruled unconstitutional