I'm In Facebook Jail ... Again
So it turns out there's way more to the saga of my being put in Facebook Jail, because . . . guess what, within less than a week, I'm already serving my second term! And it's three times the length!
I'm embarrassed to admit that I haven't fully registered the breadth of this problem until it affected me personally, which rather speaks to the level of privilege in which I more typically live. Not in just this one instance, apparently -- but, as it turns out, this shit happens to lots of people, especially people of color who get blocked for so-called "hate speech" in their language specifically aimed at combating, you know, actual hate speech.
This USA Today article from just this past April underscores the breadth of the problem (not to mention this Washington Post article from over two years ago giving merely a hint at how longstanding the problem is), and what I have dealt with over the past week is really a drop in the bucket compared to how much stupid shit other people, particularly those in marginalized communities, have had -- and continue to have -- to put up with.
It's enough to make me consider whether it's even worth keeping an active Facebook account. At least one close friend of mine, while he hasn't actually deleted his account completely (something I hear Facebook makes next to impossible), long ago abandoned the idea of even spending any time there, and I have often thought about how much more enriched and rewarding his life must be for it. On the other hand, the USA Today piece makes a particularly good point: Yet few can afford to leave the single-largest and most powerful social media platform for sharing information and creating community.
Indeed. I have a pretty massive online footprint, with longstanding active accounts on Twitter, Flickr, Instagram (although of course that one is owned by Facebook; I was not blocked from posting there though), and of course this very blog; it would not be difficult by any stretch for people to find other places to keep up with me online. But let's get real: most of my Facebook friends, including a lot of family, are not going to make that effort, especially compared to the passive ease of just seeing updates float by on their Facebook timeline. In short, as many connections as I do have on the other sites (with a fair amount of crossover on both Twitter and Instagram), Facebook is, quite simply, where the people are. Facebook has a monopoly on maximized online social connectivity, so if you want to maintain those connections (or, as I will freely admit selfishly to be the case for me, an audience), jumping ship for moral reasons is easier said than done.
And yet, the whole "free speech / hate speech" struggle is being pretty well bungled by Facebook, not that it matters to them particularly unless or until it affects their profits -- something we would all do well to keep in mind, always. And this was where I recently ran into trouble, first being sentenced to "Facebook Jail" for 24 hours last Thursday, and then getting sentenced again for a repeat of the same "infraction," this time for three days, starting on Saturday. In those periods, I could not post, comment, or "like" anything on Facebook: no interaction whatsoever. I could sign in and read, but I could not leave any mark -- at least not with the primary account I have in my own name.
What did I post that was so horrible then? Well, I posted something that included the phrase "Men are ____." I'm fairly certain I can't even quote it here, for fear of getting dinged once more and then perhaps being "punished" yet again. It may still happen again, actually, because I either posted or attempted to post the thing three times and have only been blocked for it, so far, twice. Anyway, that last word was "pigs." Apparently that phrase, among others, is verboten -- no matter the context.
What Facebook refuses to acknowledge, and clearly doesn't care about, is that context matters. Consider this line from the Vanity Fair article about all this from February of this year: Facebook, it has been observed, is able to judge content—but not intent. And that post that got me into trouble? I didn't even write it myself. It wasn't even typed into a Facebook status -- it was part of a screenshot of a tweet, which evidently Facebook algorithms can still read. And here, I'll link to that tweet, which I thought was hilarious, here.
It was flagged for so-called "hate speech," which it transparently is not, nor is it anti-men, nor is it even anti-pig. In fact, it could even be read as both pro-men and even pro-pig. In a salaciously twisted sort of way, sure, but that's beside the point. No reasonable human who lives in America would read it as "hate speech." (Also, it bears repeating that last year I unfriended two different family members for their use of the N-word, and as far as I know there was no similar consequence for them. In what universe does that make sense?)
Now here's where we get to the naiveté and hubris on my part. I got in trouble for my post three times because a) I tried -- twice! -- to post it to a friend's Facebook page; and b) I posted it also to my own timeline, complaining about getting flagged to begin with. Facebook's systems were much quicker to jump on the attempts to post on a friend's page, perhaps because that is perceived by the AI to be more aggressive. I was disallowed from posting it the first time; Facebook removed it, and stupidly I was like "Fuck Facebook," and just immediately tried to post it a second time. It just got flagged and removed again. (I later learned that Shauna, with whom I tried to share it because she is a longtime lover of pigs, actually did find it offensive, to my genuine surprise, but that's a different conversation. She assured me she did not actually report it; she did not seem to consider it actual "hate speech," and she merely thought it was -- in her words -- "inappropriate." Okay, I guess that's fair.)
Those two attempts to post to her page were on September 30. I did not get the notice that I would be blocked from Facebook for 24 hours until last Thursday, October 10. When I shared the same screenshot to my own timeline complaining about getting flagged for it, that was also on September 30 -- but I got the notice of getting blocked for that on Saturday (October 12). That one was for three days. And in none of these flagging notices was I warned that repeat offenses (if you really want to call this an "offense") would result in even longer "Facebook jail time." Had I known that, I would not have left the post on my own timeline live for so long. It was left unmolested for two weeks, making me think Facebook would just leave it alone. I realize now, I really should have known better.
And as it happens, these are actually minor examples, and I've had it easy. Many black activists, just for speaking out against actual racism and hate speech, are regularly kicked off for a full month or more, because their own content is, quite ridiculously, deemed "racist" and/or "hate speech." The USA Today article notes how "filing an appeal" is pretty much a joke, as no one ever gets the decision reversed unless a huge publication with massive influence and reach, like USA Today or The New York Times or The Washington Post, either comes to their defense or makes their individual situation widely known. And how many people have such a resource for their own defense? (That piece also notes interesting ways activists are getting around some of the language that gets them flagged: this is why you see spellings like "wypipo" -- it's not just some so-called "black culture" thing, it's literally because spelling out the phrase correctly is a trigger for so-called "hate speech" algorithms and gets them into trouble.)
In my case -- and in probably pretty much all these cases -- I am convinced no single live human eyeballs ever looked at my actual content in this entire process. Imagine how many people they would have to employ to make that possible for every instance of this sort, on a platform used by more than a billion people worldwide. In all likelihood, their AI systems saw the phrase "Men are ____" in my post; I clicked the button to appeal; it just goes back to their algorithms that confirm, yep, the banned phrase is there, so we stick by our decision. There's nothing programmed in there to consider context or nuance, or, God forbid, humor. There's just this long list of programmed rules ("comparison to animals that are culturally perceived as intellectually or physically inferior") and specific phrases it won't allow. And yes, they do have live people employed in the decision-making process of these things, but it's still clear that their first line of defense, which clearly does not work in the way they purport it to at all (again from the USA Today piece: "hate speech policies and content moderation systems formulated by a company built by and dominated by white men fail the very people Facebook claims it's trying to protect").
And that's the broader issue, both in combating racist hate speech and the "gender bias" supposedly at play in what I tried to post: Facebook has no understanding of the institutionalized racism and the institutionalized misogyny that permeates these decisions, and infuses them with the very bias they claim to be working against, going up to the very top. It's precisely shit like this that is reason there is a desperate need for all companies to hire way more women and minorities in executive leadership roles. In the end, Mark Zuckerberg is just another dumb rich [opposite of black] guy.
Just a quick postscript on all this: there are workarounds, especially if you maintain multiple accounts -- but also, I discovered, even when you are yourself blocked from posting or sharing anything on Facebook, they do allow friends to tag you in photos and posts. So, even though I was unable to post my requisite Happy Hour photo with Laney yesterday afternoon, she posted the photo for me -- and since she tagged me, that post still showed up on my feed, and is there when you visit my main Facebook page, and is visible to all of my friends, not just Laney's. Another thing I did, though, was have Guru "post" a photo of himself lying on my arm, and again, with my own account tagged in it, that also showed up as an update in my feed. Suck it, Facebook!
So. What else, then? I suppose I could start with yesterday, since I already mentioned Happy Hour with Laney -- from which all of today's DLU photos come. These are all views from the 16th, top floor of the Charter Hotel on 2nd and Steward downtown, from the outdoor seating areas of the Fog Room, that form an L shape around the northwest corner of the building. I took a fair number of photos, though, and you can view the entire, 27-shot set on Flickr here.
The first four shots in that set were actually taken by Shobhit, who then texted them to me, when he was there at a networking event back in July, during his brother's visit (Puneet was busy at the education conference he was in Seattle for). Kind of ironically, yesterday was a beautiful day and made for great photos even though it's mid-October; Shobhit's shots are notably gloomier as it was on a rare July day that happened to be overcast.
And I only know about this place because Shobhit happened to find it after attending his networking event. I immediately asked Laney if she wanted to go there for Happy Hour sometime and she said yes -- but, we already had our Happy Hour locations chosen for July, August and September, so the soonest we could plan for it was October. We knew it would be a slight gamble in terms of weather, but the weather just happened to work out for us. It did actually get a bit chilly, particularly at the table we first sat at along the west side of the building, and we later moved over to a warmer table in the outdoor area that had a warm fire down its center.
So, this was actually the second time this year we did Happy Hour at a rooftop bar, the first time being when we went to The Mountaineering Club atop the Graduate Hotel in the U District, and that building is also 16 floors! That one is much older, though, built originally in 1931, and is 215 ft tall. The Charter Hotel downtown was just built last year and stands at 160 ft. So, calculating average per-floor heights and bearing in mind we were standing one floor below the roof of each building, I suppose it can be extrapolated that at The Mountaineering Club we were 202 feet above the ground, and yesterday we were 150 feet up (not to mention being much closer to sea level downtown) -- not even quite the height of the 175-ft Seattle Great Wheel (although we were still up a hill enough from it that our view from the Fog Room still looked down on it).
Anyway. I budgeted $30 for this, so unlike most cases for our monthly Happy Hour, I ate lunch first and intended only to have a couple of drinks. Laney chose not to have alcohol, and was kind of annoyed they charged her $4 each for her soda water with lime and bitters, but she did have a sandwich with some fries. She often has issues with heights and was a lot more comfortable, in addition to being warmer, when we moved to the long table with the fire so we could sit further in from the ledge. They even included a 20% "service charge" on the check, which we only understood to be in lieu of a gratuity -- even though the receipts have lines for additional tips -- and that was also annoying. It was not technically "Happy Hour" at this place though and so my two drinks were full priced at $12. They were good, though. My total came to $32. In spite of all these details, Laney said she'd like to come back, and so we perhaps will again sometime in a warmer late spring month.
I also had one and a half drinks at home before even leaving, while Shobhit was at his work shift, so I got a pretty nice buzz going yesterday. Between that and Shobhit's insistence on opening a huge jug of snack mix that I could then not stop eating, this morning my weight shot back up 2 lbs to 157 lbs. Gack.
On Saturday, I did the first of four planned Star Wars double features in the lead-up to Episode IX (The Rise of Skywalker) opening in December. I did this back in 2015 in the lead-up to The Force Awakens as well, in both cases going in episode order, so it started with Episodes I and II. Gabriel and Kornelija actually showed up partway through the first showing in 2015, but were too busy this time; Claudia had told me at work she and Dylan and her son Jasper were a "maybe" but it depended on Jasper's fickle teenage whims -- so, I did not bank on them coming, and they did not. Evan and Elden were also unavailable, and so even though I still went down to the Braeburn Condos theater to watch them, I did so all by myself. Shobhit might have watched with me had he been home, but he worked that day as well. I'm going to keep to my schedule of having these four double features exactly three weeks apart, but I may very well end up watching them all on my own. Perhaps later ones will interest people more; episodes I and II are easily the least popular among Star Wars fans.
Before that, though, Shobhit wanted to go out for breakfast, and he suggested looking up a place near Interbay since we wanted to stop by the PCC office to pick up some heavier samples I needed the car handy for getting home. I found a place called Tenth West on Queen Anne after searching Yelp for "diners," which is a kind of place Shobhit tends to enjoy -- and indeed he did enjoy this one. So much so that he said multiple times that he thinks he'll want to return there multiple times over. The serving sizes are not huge but the food was good and the prices reasonable, at least by Seattle standards.
Oh! And we also stopped at Champion Party Supply, where I got some accessories for my Halloween costume idea. I still don't quite know how I will pull it off but I feel like I kind of have to figure it out now, since I've purchased part of it already. Shobhit was at one point even suggesting I guy this green bodysuit that was $34 and I just about wondered if he were on drugs -- had I bought something like that for that much without it being his own suggestion, he'd have a fucking conniption. Sometimes I truly don't know what his deal is.
When we stopped at the office, Marie was at her desk in the IT department, hard at work. I introduced her to Shobhit, and learned she was running some tests for something that will ultimately benefit me, so then I was like, "Well in that case, keep up the good work!"
Shobhit also worked Friday evening, during which time I just took myself to see Lucy in the Sky in the U District, and it sucked.
[posted 12:17 pm]