Within two hours I started receiving a handful of notes from people who are friends on my personal Facebook page that their posting of my piece, entitled “Why Trump’s supporters won’t care about Cohen and Manafort,” had been removed.
Sometimes the removal was accompanied by a message from Facebook. “Spam” was the most common reason given, but a couple of people were told Facebook removed the post because “it did not follow our Community Standards.”
Immediately I went to my original post, which led to the link with this graph: “Right now the value of Trump to the Trump voter is he is all that stands between them and handing the keys to Washington back over to the people inside Washington. That’s it. He’s their only option. You’ve got to pick the insiders or him.”
The post was gone.
Why? Facebook had given me no reason why it would censor a story, and asking them for an explanation wasn’t easy.
First I politely published a public Tweet requesting some direction. No answer. I noticed that their Direct Message was open on Twitter so I asked in that format. No answer. Then I turned to their own page and asked through a series of confusing messaging options that appear to require a Ph.D. to access let alone find, still no answer.
Ninety minutes after removing it, the article reappeared as if nothing ever happened.
No one told me why it was taken down. No one told me why the piece suddenly reappeared with no explanation of what had happened.
Facebook offers no transparency for its methods or decisions.
The article was based on my conversations with Trump voters. It had no expletives, conspiracy theories, hate speech or sexual language. What sort of algorithm would find it, much less censor it?
Perhaps someone doesn’t like my stories and complained about it. But then, who is that person and why does Facebook give them that sort of power?
The third option is that someone working for Facebook actually saw it and made the decision to take it down. If that’s the case, what standards are they working from?
Facebook has become the world’s biggest publisher, reaching many more people than daily newspapers. Bad enough that they arbitrarily decide what people can and cannot read. Worse is that they won’t tell anyone why.
We also posted, and had removed, a NY Post article yesterday. At around 9AM we posted Chris Perez' piece 'Mollie Tibbetts murder suspect worked under false name: employer' to the Facebook. A few hours later, it was gone. Facebook notified us, "We removed this post because it looks like spam to us. If you did post this and don't believe that it's spam, you can let us know."
We didn't 'let them know' anything. Someone must have. One hour later it was back up with the note, "Thanks again for letting us know about this post. We've taken another look and found that it doesn't go against our Community Standards, so we've restored your post. We're sorry for the trouble and appreciate you taking the time to get in touch with us so that we could correct this."
Thanks again for letting us know about this post? Never did. Guessing Facebook was removing pro law enforcement, anti illegal immigration, and pro Trump posts again, got caught, and backtracked.
Real News.
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