Ah, Facebook jail. I’ve spent many an hour carving hashtags in those brick walls while waiting for some minor offense to fade. I’ve come close to losing my account completely a couple of times over the years.
It’s easy to joke about, but for people like me whose livelihood depends on social media and who aren’t just scam artists that don’t care if they burn through 200 identities a year, the prospect of losing an account or having a page shut down after you’ve spent years building it up can be a major threat. Late last year, a fairly huge page where I was co-administrator was shuttered by FB for some repeated violations (by other admins). I’ve not talked about what I know about that situation, but today I’m going to share what I learned from that, and from my other brushes with the long arm of the Zuck.
Let’s get started! Use the header button below to navigate between pages, it’s a fairly long post and I didn’t want to wall-o-text you.
I’ve made occasional remarks for years about the tactic of “munging” words that are problematic – “adult” language, or words like “Covid” or “vaccine.” Those people who do things like t.hi.s and or talk about “yt ppl” instead of “white people” think they’re being clever? They’re not. They’re buffoons who think they’re smart, and here’s the funny part – Facebooks algorithm won’t punish you for saying “Covid,” but if you say c.o.vi.d they absolutely will because that’s a clear sign you’re deliberately trying to avoid/trick the algo, and that’s a clear display of intent to post content you think is a violation and get away with it. That makes you a troublemaker who’s intentionally trying to get away with breaking the rules, and that gets the algo’s negative attention even if you’re not actually breaking them.
You’re not gonna get banned for simply naming an identity group in discussion. You say something like “all white people are murderers,” then yeah. That’s not because you said “white people,” it’s because that’s bigoted as hell and bigotry is not allowed. Same with Black people or any other ethnic group, LBGT folks, etc. You’re not getting banned for using a neutral and inoffensive label for a group, you’re getting banned for what you say about that group, because what you said about that group was prejudiced/discriminatory/bigoted/racist/sexist/homophobic. You’re not getting banned for “talking about” vaccines, you’re getting banned because what you’re saying can kill people, ya jerk. Maybe take a look at that instead of thinking you’re c.l.ev.e.r.ly f00ling the algo.
