Facebook Shadow Bans: Why Haven’t Major News Stations Caught On?
11/13/2020: Edited to added Facebook corporate office information.
Recently my side account, only used for friends and family stuff, was randomly restricted until November 26th for going against “Community Standards”, except it didn’t say exactly what it was I had done. It went to my support inbox, nothing there.
Yet I couldn’t do anything. I took to Twitter and found my answer. Thousands of people were dealing with the same issue, using the hashtag #Facebookdisabledme. Same thing on Reddit. Post after post from confused people as to why they were randomly restricted without any given reason, or a way to appeal it. What was worse were people who had never even had a first restriction waking up to find they had lost 10+ year old accounts with no given reason or way to get those memories back. Or others getting 24hour lockouts that claim they need to prove who they are, yet once they have, they still can’t get back in. The last one was FB saying something about “complex entities”, yet no one has any clue what that even means. What is also interesting is the restricted accounts have access to some things, but not others, and it’s never exactly the same for each person. Some can post stories, post to their own profiles, comments to other profiles, post to groups, like things, yet others can or cannot do a random mix of these things. The last interesting part is the dates given. Usually Facebook gives a time of how long you’re restricted. Be in 24hours, 3 days, 7 days or 30 days. Yet now people, including myself, got a date. Many reported the same date as mine, other dates had dates between November 24th-December 29th! Yes 60 day random shadow restrictions. Lastly, people were posting to Facebook’s Help Community about the issue. But if someone tries to reply to the person’s post they get the message “something went wrong”, and are booted out.
All this information was gathered from social media. What was interesting was, even to today 11/04/2020, there hasn’t been a single article on the matter from any major news outlet. Yes the election has been the main interest, but this attack on Facebook users has started since about October 1st and is growing hourly. Many, especially on Twitter, are assuming this is politically based. That would be a logical explanation, as many libertarians assumed it was out for them. Same with republicans who insulted Joe Biden. And same for Democrats who attacked Trump. But then you notice, it’s attacking all sides. So the decision has been that this likely started as an AI filter to attack Russian bots and QAnon people. Except somehow the dragnet got millions of others!
Another thing to look at is when this seemed to have started. Some say they noticed something odd in September, but most started in October, when the Terms of Service for Facebook changed. What is interesting is, there doesn’t seem to be any humans doing customer service checks of anything the AI flags! A good example is the recently used phrase “Joe and the Hoe” to attack Joe Biden and Kamela Harris. Technically “hoe” is a simple gardening tool, whereas in the context of the insult “ho” is a rude term for a sexual woman.
But under Facebook’s new TOS, “hoe” is now considered offensive:
The entire “Hate Speech” section of the TOS is pretty alarming in how much it will catch now. You can no longer curse as it will cause an automatic flag
The real issue here is that, again, people are getting flagged for things that before now wouldn’t have done anything. But what makes it worse is this is AI flagging. And when people, if they even get the option to, try to request a review, the AI almost immediately says the decision is final. Which means there is no human service anymore. You would think this would be illegal, especially with so many who have lost accounts are people who used FB for business and spent money for advertising through them. Except technically FB is a private company. The users choose to be there, and in turn, are agreeing to allow FB to do whatever it wants with their accounts, and any money they put into the site. So they can do whatever they want with customer support. Nice thought right?
The only information on potentially reaching Facebook in a physical way is to go to their corporate office in the Silicon Valley, CA, if you live close enough or are willing to drive there.
All their other issues have been closed most of the year due to covid-19, which is understandable in one way, but many offices reopened months ago, so why not theirs?
With all this said, again, why is there no major news about this issue? That is something that I and many others cannot figure out. None of us want to be conspiracy theorists, but it is odd that most of the main attacks on accounts have happened around the very end of October right before the United States election and makes so the restricted accounts can’t do anything for a month. Rather interesting way to slow down communication at a serious time.
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