Saturday 7 January 2017

Facebook just banned God for 30 days!


Facebook has banned "God" from posting on their site for 30 days because a bunch of right-wing snowflakes got so upset about one of his posts that they mass reported it, resulting in the ban.

The post that earned the satirical "God" page their 30 day ban was an appeal for Americans to stop spending so much money on their vast military and fund education and health care instead (see image). Before the post was deleted it picked up over 100,000 likes and 15,000 shares.

It's becoming increasingly clear that Facebook is incapable of differentiating between political content and abuse. In fact, they're so bad at it that they keep getting things completely backwards. The extreme-right hate group Britain First continues to be allowed to incite hatred against Muslims, immigrants, left-wing people and social liberals with impunity (despite the fact their leaders are a bunch of scam artists and criminals with total contempt for the British legal system). Meanwhile a satirical "God" page that has never incited hatred against anyone gets hit with a huge ban for posting a political opinion.


One of the big ironies of course is that the right-winger snowflakes who mass reported the "God" post because they're offended at such an obviously satirical political message are highly likely to be the same kind of people who rant on and on and on about how they're being censored by a dictatorial liberal elite, simply because people in the modern world tend to call them out on their racism, misogyny, homophobia and bigotry.

As far as this kind of person is concerned, any attempt to criticise what they said is unacceptable censorship (the censorship fallacy), but their efforts to get posts removed and people banned from Facebook are perfectly fine!



The ban notification "God" gets from Facebook
when he tries to post content.
The Facebook reporting system lends itself to mob rule. If enough people mass report a post then the algorithms kick in, the post gets taken down, and the person who posted it ends up getting hit with a ban from posting anything else. This means that right-wing authoritarians can orchestrate mass-reporting efforts in order to get left-liberal content removed from Facebook and bans handed out to pages they don't like.

Censorious right-wing flash mobs have succeeded in getting several of my posts removed from Facebook, including one that pointed out that the Queen Mother was a Nazi sympathiser in the 1930s, which meant I was banned from commenting, even just to explain to followers of my page what was going on.

Facebook desperately needs to improve its reporting system to prevent censorious mobs from having the ability get content deleted and people banned simply for posting political content they object to. it's unacceptable that Facebook continue sitting on their hands while right-wing mobs game their reporting algorithms to censor political content.


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