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Facebook summarily axed without notice today:
* the admins (but not the mods) of the GameB group including @jim_rutt
* the moderators of an anti-QAnon group
* A left-wing workers party group in the UK, @SWP_Britain
* Numerous bewildered individuals wondering "what did I say"
* the admins (but not the mods) of the GameB group including @jim_rutt
* the moderators of an anti-QAnon group
* A left-wing workers party group in the UK, @SWP_Britain
* Numerous bewildered individuals wondering "what did I say"
When I posted about the above 3 admins having their accounts suddenly disappeared without even so much as a warning or explanation, a friend of mine who works at Facebook reached out to me and offered to submit an appeal internally on behalf of these people.
It's at this point I realize there's absolutely no recourse for people who've had their account completely wiped from the record. There's no "appeal" form. No FAQ. No instructions on what to do next.
Meanwhile, the non-Raptured folk left behind in Facebook speculated in all different directions:
"Facebook is cracking down on thinking that challenges the status quo."
"Well they must have done _something_" (presumed guilt because of punishment, a common fallacy)
"Facebook is cracking down on thinking that challenges the status quo."
"Well they must have done _something_" (presumed guilt because of punishment, a common fallacy)
A conversation bloomed over in the GameB Discord speculating on how The Algorithms had started including anybody to the right of @billmaher as a "gateway drug to the alt-right", alluding to the following: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/youtube-far-right-radicalization-study-877061/
At 8pm EST the Game B admin+mod team met in the Zoom Situation Room, talking through the threat Facebook poses to individuals and to online communities that have spent years -- some, decades -- painstakingly building social capital on their platform.
And at 8:30pm EST during the meeting, I gazed at my phone's Facebook feed to see that all three of the Game B admins had been summarily restored -- as mysteriously and opaquely as they had been wiped away in the first place.
Did Facebook figure something out on their own? Highly unlikely. Us privileged A*holes used several channels of pressure on FB today. Inside channels most people don't have access to.
Q: Why does it require special privileged access channels to appeal a wiped account?
Q: Why does it require special privileged access channels to appeal a wiped account?
Why does it require special privileged access channels to appeal a wiped account?
Let's ask my privileged inside source at Facebook.
Let's ask my privileged inside source at Facebook.
The picture I've gathered today is not of a Facebook with any kind of authentic intentionality or politics, but rather a hideous cybernetic chimera with very little internal self-coherence, overpowered in its agency to randomly squash ant-like human lives with cold impunity.
What happened today was so clearly a glitch in the Facebook Matrix, a buggy release of an automated community-moderation Squiddy just following orders coming from frankly stupid machine learning frameworks that can't even discern a negation like "anti-QAnon" from its opposite.
Facebook's unbelievably gargantuan size means that, at this point, their automated moderation algorithms *have* to be rolled out with some internally-approved threshold of acceptable false positives.
Acceptable losses, as they say. Casualties of the social media wars.
Acceptable losses, as they say. Casualties of the social media wars.
Analogy time: When innocent ppl get struck down by self-righteous war hawks in the real world, those "can't make an 
without
" types, the networks of people connected to them instantly lose massive amounts of trust in the goodness and fairness of the world.
without " types, the networks of people connected to them instantly lose massive amounts of trust in the goodness and fairness of the world.
It'd be hyperbolic to say loss of social media account == loss of life. But the feeling of being torn out literally bit by bit, erased even from historical record of a platform meant to represent a plurality of human connection modes _during a pandemic_ shouldn't be overlooked.
Now that accounts have been restored, we have the task of managing community trust damage via deductive analysis, e.g. if those "liberal techies" at FB were really trying to kill GameB why not just shut down the whole group?
Without a didactic process to curtail the narratives that were already at play before this all happened, our communities will certainly trend twds swirling morasses of paranoid Victimhood with this shit happens.
That's all work for community leaders. And we think about ROI.
That's all work for community leaders. And we think about ROI.
In other words, even if community leaders of these virtual villages don't ultimately think FB is deliberately "censoring" or intentionally "deplatforming", what we feel is the same: total inability to trust the digital landscape.
Why build a village on a giant sinkhole?
Why build a village on a giant sinkhole?
