It is, sadly, not entirely surprising that Facebook is censoring articles critical of Meta.
The Kansas Reflector published an artical about Meta censoring environmental articles about climate change — deeming them “too controversial”.
Facebook then censored the article about Facebook censorship, and then after an independent site published a copy of the climate change article, Facebook censored it too.
The CNN story says Facebook apologized and said it was a mistake and was fixing it.
Color me skeptical, because today I saw this:
Yes, that’s right: today, April 6, I get a notification that they removed a post from August 12. The notification was dated April 4, but only showed up for me today.
I wonder why my post from August 12 was fine for nearly 8 months, and then all of a sudden, when the same website runs an article critical of Facebook, my 8-month-old post is a problem. Hmm.
Riiiiiight. Cybersecurity.
This isn’t even the first time they’ve done this to me.
On September 11, 2021, they removed my post about the social network Mastodon (click that link for screenshot). A post that, incidentally, had been made 10 months prior to being removed.
While they ultimately reversed themselves, I subsequently wrote Facebook’s Blocking Decisions Are Deliberate — Including Their Censorship of Mastodon.
That this same pattern has played out a second time — again with something that is a very slight challenege to Facebook — seems to validate my conclusion. Facebook lets all sort of hateful garbage infest their site, but anything about climate change — or their own censorship — gets removed, and this pattern persists for years.
There’s a reason I prefer Mastodon these days. You can find me there as @jgoerzen@floss.social.
So. I’ve written this blog post. And then I’m going to post it to Facebook. Let’s see if they try to censor me for a third time. Bring it, Facebook.
@jgoerzen :
John, seriously, I thought you were on the “good” side of the Web…