Facebook’s blocking algorithm closing down dissent

It’s interesting

I got banned for sharing links for 24 hours and still haven’t had a reply from Farcebook’s support people – suspect I will never get one. I’ve also seen a lot of activist friends saying they suddenly can’t post things or work on groups they support.

The link I shared was from Scientific American blog – talked about how sex isn’t purely from XY combinations, and how the science is very broad. That is, trans people are real and their existence is backed by the actual science, rather than the nonsense the bigots are spouting.

I think there must be a bot farm (probably more than one) somewhere that marks articles like that to stop people like me sharing them and FB automatically then just bans people who share them.

I think there’s some paid-for shenanigans that does swathes of automatic community standards complaints to game FBs automatic shut down algorithm and keep our voices quiet.

Thinking with links it should be possible create a simple page to just reference the link without redirecting to it and share that instead, so people have to click twice, but at least the information can still be shared without censorship. At least until the bot owners see the new page … it will be a long and boring battle.

The attacks on individuals though, that is more troublesome. Unless they allow us to start registering support for people I’m not sure how to approach that one.

Of course, the right-wing conspiracists have been complaining about this for a while and the left have been cheering on blocking and preventing them from posting. Be careful what you wish for.

As an aside, if I recall, there was a massive campaign against porn in (I think) Australia in the 80’s. The first shops that were shut down were the ones offering material to help LGBT youth. There is precedent for this.