This is interesting…
I am receiving screenshots and statements reporting @Facebook blocking and/or deleting live-streamed #Catholic Masses and #Christian content during the ongoing #coronavirus restrictions.
I have contacted @fbnewsroom, as the evidence suggests targeting.#CatholicTwitter pic.twitter.com/Z6XoKP78m6
— Bree A Dail (@breeadail) March 25, 2020
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What the problem was, it doesn’t seem to have lasted.
I like the screen shot with “245 other countries”. Here I only thought there were 189…like genders, borders are fluid too. Side note, when I try to post in thehill.com, I get a notice that I have been placed in a time out…for 945 years!
It’s not just masses. All Livestream videos were deleted. I broadcast Livestream of the curfew siren every night at 9pm. Yesterday morning all my live videos were deleted. Our priest friend’s daily mass and rosary were also deleted. We found out that it’s just in the mobile app that they disappeared, they can still be accessed via desktop. We reported the bug and the videos reappeared about 30 minutes later.
Though I would not be surprised that Facebook is doing this, there could be another reason. The countries that are blocked, could it be due to that government’s policy? UAE I am surprised, Afghanistan, not so much. When I was deployed, I did have to use a VPN to access some things that were blocked by the Afghan government when I was using Afghan based wi-fi. US, UK, and Italian run wi-fi was not an issue.
I abandoned Fakebook a year ago because two private messages I sent were intercepted for violating community standards. The offensive content was the address of my blog on Catholic topics.
It was not the subject which I found disturbing, but that they were obviously monitoring message content and interfering when it was not a fit for their PC outlook.
I would expect that as the election draws near, they will ramp up such activity.
Right now Facebook is overwhelmed with content. They are using algorithms to determine what should be allowed, it’s not people doing this (in every case). The algorithms are not perfect, and sometimes stuff gets caught up in them when it shouldn’t – like a fishing net grabbing a bunch of crabs when all you want is tuna. I have seen MANY life Masses on my feed, and I know for a fact that ChurchMilitant is streaming live videos with Catholic content daily without issues. I had a post of my own in a group removed (it was not Catholic related), and after I clicked the “dispute” button, the post was put back in place a couple of days later with an apology from Facebook.
I am not waving a flag for them — but we should be mindful that not EVERYTHING is an action out to get us. Sometimes, absolutely, but in this current crisis I think it is more the case of content overload and imperfect algorithms than it is malice.
No, not everything FB does is a conscious act against us. At least, I could not say with certainty.
However, in the censoring of private messages, one must ask how a private message violates community standards, when the community is not privy to the content.
As to the matter of algorithms, the evidence at the time suggests that it was not entirely an automated process. I tested for that by having some friends post the same content in private messages to me. No interference.
Facebook is among the handful of Internet companies with truly amazing system power. Like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, they maintain massive infrastructure. As a computer professional, I cannot say there is evidence of their system being “overwhelmed”, and they certainly never seem to let a priest maintain his title for long, unmolested. (However, when I checked such things, I did find that “Imam” was found in some cases.)