WHAT MATTERS MOST

Things that are A-OK on Facebook:

-Racial slurs
-Overt racism
-Doxxing
-Sexism that would make a 1950s Friars Club audience wince and think "Geez, take it easy pal"
-Fake news
-Copious profanity
-Fake profiles from scam marketers

Things that get you banned from Facebook for seven days:

-Posting a screenshot of a message some random stranger sent you reading, "You are a fucking pussy and allow your minions to speak, and attack, on your behalf. Nice. Fuck off."

Makes sense to me. See you back there in a week!

37 thoughts on “WHAT MATTERS MOST”

  • I still don't get it. Why would anyone want to use Facebook? It's nearly impossible to follow anyone there. There's no simple display of everything a particular person has posted without dozens, even hundreds of strangers, half of them with obviously fake names, interjecting stuff that I can't imagine anyone being interested in, and that's not counting the advertising which I assume is there except I don't see it thanks to an ad blocker.

    The user interface is terrible. Has anyone EVER figured out how to read a notification? I keep getting emails that I have new notifications, but there's no link to see them and no obvious "see notifications" button or link on the first page after I log in. I think I have several hundred notifications stacked up now. Besides, if they send me an email about a notification, they might as well send me the notification itself.

    The only thing I can imagine is that it is possible to make money on Facebook, though how one might do this is not obvious from the interface. Do you get paid when someone reads one of those ads I block? Is there a lottery with the odds based on your "friend" count? Does Facebook make it easier to sell tee shirts?

  • Stonekettle also found out that calling actual Nazis "Nazis" can get you a 7 day ban. I'm sure for Facebook this is fine.

  • Wow, Facebook is fucking ridiculous. If you and Jim Wright (Stonekettle) ever happen to be banned simultaneously, my world will be a much lonelier place :( The comments sections of your posts are my main daily source of sarcastic sanity! Among your followers, I feel comforted, knowing that when we are all sent to the camps, there will be no shortage of dark humor. Stay strong, comrade. See you in the new year…

  • Somehow I manage to get through life without using FB. I get the idea that there aren't many of us, but I don't know how to measure that…

  • I use facebook to keep up with my many neices/nephews and their kidaloos doings. There are about 20 of the former and 40 of the latter and there's no way I could find out what's going on with them, otherwise.

    For public platforming, I like my seldom used blog and places like this where there are a limited number of complete assholes to deal with.

  • I don't do the Facebook in part because of the blatant information theft and selling-it-to-the-highest-bidder, in part because my crazy extended family are always battling each other to the virtual death and my real-life friends are always unfriending each other and then running to me to brag/whine about it, and in part because of countless examples of what you and Jim Wright are going through, while in the meantime the most obscene and grotesque and downright-illegal stuff is posted there with nary a blink from the Facebook staff.

  • This is ridiculous. Do you get banned just for being flagged or reported? Is this a FB algorithm or are there people that you can actually talk to about this?

  • I had a Facebook account, but just recently closed it. Not because of the above non-sense but because it seems to be set up to get me to argue with old friends.

  • Facebook is run by algorithms that don't see a problem with racist speech but do have a problem with posts exposing other people's stupidity. I've given up flagging racist and profane stuff that people post, those never go anywhere, but flagging that someone is making fun of you or "bullying" you, the person automatically gets sent to Facebook jail, as if that will actually accomplish anything.

    I sure hope that woman who send you a rude message after making fun of you for being hit when you were four is proud of herself.

  • I've heard many arguments in favor of Facebook, but they all seem to pivot on the notion that you should want stay in immediate, instant, and perpetual touch with everyone you ever have or ever will know well enough to beg to be liked by. Whereas in real life, and speaking only for me, out of sight is out of mind and that's the way I mean to keep it. If the birds come home they will not find a roost.

  • Facebook. Don't need to keep up with, oh, who's in my past? New Age Jewish mafia, Costa Rica surfers, aging chefs ? Shit I don't know.
    All important past players in my dream world are remembered and occasionally contemplated, even sent buenas ondas through the ether, not to get too something about it.
    People who are close know how to reach me. That's enough.
    Got no brand to push, either. So . . .

  • Shit, all the people in my past are gone except less than 10. But I have about the same number of current good friends I met on Facebook and talk with at least weekly, if not daily. I've cut the cord before but it's hard now that it's pretty much my social life. The algorithm is getting really annoying now though, I keep getting ads for socialist causes and hard alcohol.

  • When FB started I joined and soon had a bazillion "friends". Thus got daily trash from people I barely knew. "Stacy and Marc are engaged!" Who? The cousins of the sons of a kid I knew in second grade. So several years ago I dropped it.

    About a year ago I rejoined under a nom de plume (so I wouldn't get friend requests from people who know me). Now I'm only friends with my daughters and a couple of other people, so the daily trash is actually interesting to me. "Ceri (my older daughter) and Nariko are engage!" Yippee! About fucking time! (I don't discredit the value of the headlock I put him in last year when they were visiting. grin)

    What I like about it now is that I follow my favorite bloggers – Ed, Rude, Jim Wright, coupla others – as well as some anti-repug sites, and thus get stuff that is keeping me as sane as possible.

  • FB off my account because I didn't register with a 'real' name. I've been negotiating with them for about a year, to no avail. Who knows you are a dog on the internet ?

  • How strange. I wonder if the screenshotee flagged the post or it if was a random bot thing. Given what gets a pass, I'd assume someone had to flag it as a problem. Whatever the case, I look forward to seeing what you get up to there in the near future.

  • Barkus Annointo says:

    "Friends come & go, but enemies accumulate."
    Whoever said this said it long before the invention of Facebook
    & the other social media engines which are in the process of
    destroying mankind. I suspect that there is a secret cabal of
    internet gazillionaires who actually believe that if they can sign
    enough people up to these sites that the singularity will happen
    & we can begin our new digital, virtual lives, freed from our messy
    meatspace bodies. Good luck to them; I won't be at the picnic.

  • Like democommie, i find FB handy for keeping up with my many nieces and nephews. OTOH, i know a couple people who seem to have nothing to do but post their "update" almost daily. I just delete those emails as part of my daily routine.

  • Anonymous Prof says:

    I have a serious question.

    What the hell *is* Facebook?

    My students keep asking me if I'm on Facebook, and when I say no, they always say, "ZOMG I can't believe you're not on FB! Why not, Dr. Anon? EVERYBODY uses Facebook!"

    So I Google the student's name, and find their Facebook page, where I find:

    – their name
    – their picture
    – a list of their favorite bands
    – links to groups they belong to, none of which ever have more than three posts, tops.

    Could someone explain to me how this generation of college students came to assume that every normal human being must maintain a page, on Zuckerberg's servers, with their name, photo, and favorite bands on it? Oh, and with links to discussion forums that are empty- don't forget that. Very important.

    THIS is what everyone is talking about? A website where kids post their name and photo, and make cursory attempts at conversation that never, ever take off?

  • Jimcat, I don't think people who reject FB are cranky curmudgeons. Those of us not on FB are not enthralled with the strange free-not-free spectrum of speech allowed; the insidious mining of personal data for resale and the general high school quality of it all. If you like FB, go for it. I do get really annoyed when businesses use it as their only online presence and I, as a non-user, am blocked from seeing the information on their page. I get that it is free, but you alienate a lot of potential customers by only using FB…

    Anonymous Prof: yes, that is what they are talking about. But it isn't just kids.

  • Anonymous Prof, what you see of the public "profile" for a person when you aren't logged in/and/or aren't their "friend" is nothing like what it would be if you were.

  • I suspect the time spent deciphering F***Book comes out of the time actually talking to people, when you can get their face out of their phone, that is…although it used to matter to know little things about people, that evolutionary model may be obsolete.

    I find that time communicating with infants and toddlers is much better spent.

  • I really hate righteous assholes. But I will love them because they are human and being human involves being an asshole and a dick and a (well, something else). FB is what it is. Unless you Einsteins come up with something better, this is it!
    FB is the best chance us assholes have of trolling.
    Maybe this is good place for me to start.

  • I shall begin…

    Hey Prof dude, why are you doing the gestapo crap on your students? We are all gestapo in this world.

  • Anonymous Prof asks:

    “What the hell *is* Facebook?
    […]
    “Could someone explain to me how this generation of college students came to assume that every normal human being must maintain a page, on Zuckerberg's servers, with their name, photo, and favorite bands on it?”

    (The following is not precise, but close enough to serve as an explanation.)

    As Isaac noted, access to Facebook is severely limited when you are not logged in as a Facebook member. It is essentially useless to viewers who have not established a Facebook account.

    As a member, the main page you see is your “News Feed,” which is a combination of entries your friends and the owners of pages you have liked have posted to their own timelines. In effect, you’re reading a blog made up of posts from all your friends; and anything you post goes into all of their news feeds.

    In this sense, Facebook is a “customized” experience for each user. You customize it primarily by your choice of friends; your friends, in turn, customize your experience, and that of all their other friends, by what they choose to post. Facebook itself customizes things in a thoroughly inscrutable way, by prioritizing some posts and burying others according to algorithms they don’t divulge and over which users have very little control.

    If each of my Facebook “friends” had a blog, I’d never follow all of those separately; and, like me, few of them by themselves would post enough interesting material often enough that anyone would bother to follow them. Combined, though, they make a busy, somewhat cluttered news feed in which one can almost always find something of interest. Discussions take place mostly in comments to posts, mostly among the friends of the person who made the initial post.

    In my reckoning, it’s unfortunate that Facebook came about as an owned entity, rather than an open, federated protocol (like the web, email, Usenet, etc.). It gives Zuckerberg’s faceless corporate meat-grinder way too much power. That ship has sailed, though. Network effects have made Facebook a singleton for its class of interactions, much like YouTube for sharing videos or Twitter for observations short enough to fit on a bumper sticker or a T-shirt.

  • Robert Walker-Smith says:

    I have a carefully curated FB friends list, with no more than two degrees of separation. The primary benefit I get is hearing about news stories that would otherwise escape me. If I want to know more, I just look up actual news accounts. It's remarkable how much I heard about NODAPL resistance through FB, compared with mainstream news.

    It definitely helps that I do not have the proverbial bevy of older relatives with antediluvian beliefs and a passion for mendacious memes.

  • @mothra: I quit a couple of local businesses who took all their information to Facebook and had multiple deals only to people who "liked" their page. I'd been a regular customer of one of them for 30 years but apparently they only value their customers who will do free marketing and advertising for them. Friends who had liked them were then targeted by similar companies as Facebook sold their personal information. Screw that.

  • I continue to have precisely two conversations with my friends about Facebook, over and over again:

    1) How much my friends hate it; and
    2) How they can't believe I'm not on it.

  • I often read grumbling about the algorithms that Facebook utilizes to punish users by temporarily banning them. But in my initially unintentional (and, yeah, later deliberate) experience, these stints in Facebook jail are not the result of some bot crawling millions of pages and flagging the violators. They are the direct result of a post being reported to Facebook, and the more people who report it, and the more often a particular user is reported, the more likely they'll be punished. One day last year my news feed saw fit to inform me that one of my "friends" (some person from high school who I barely remembered and who seldom posted anything on FB) had "liked" a particular post (a public post by someone also from high school, who was not on my friend list). It horrified me because the post they "liked" was horribly Islamaphobic, and in a sick sexually graphic way. I unfriended that person and reported the post. Later that day I got notified by Facebook that it had violated community standards and been removed. The offender was locked out for a week (I learned that by visiting his page and seeing a post from someone informing his friends that he was his FB jail.) I have to confess that on four or five subsequent occasions I visited his page and saw more really horrible stuff and reported it. Three times I got notified that the post did not violate community standards (all three were racist memes, so I'm thinking sharing a meme doesn't result in a violation) but the other two posts, hateful, racist, Trump-loving rants, were removed and now he's up to a 30-day lockout. I may not have been the only person who reported these items, but it's clear they were reviewed by Facebook and action was taken based on the report(s). And no I am not the least remorseful about interfering with this asshole Trump-lover's right to post what he wants on his own Facebook. If he's going to continue to be too stupid to make his wall friends-only, then I'm going to keep reporting them and have a good laugh when he gets out of jail and goes on rants about Zuckerberg being in league with "0bummer" and the "libtards." It's my own little microcosm of resistance.
    In the case of the matter described in this blog post, it seems likely the person in the screenshot is the one who reported it, and probably got friends to do so, too

  • Anonymous Prof says:

    I am very uncomfortable with Facebook policing racist and "Islamophobic" posts, frankly, and I'll tell you why.

    If I were a college student on Facebook, I would be criticising the Bible. Would I get banned, with the justification that criticising the Bible is anti-Christian?

  • In the initial reported post this guy mentioned a particular apartment complex that was being overrun by "sand n**gers" and advised anyone who lived in the area to bring their dogs in at night because said "sand n**gers" are known to fuck dogs and other available small animals. And more stuff. The others were similarly offensive towards black people, with ape references and whatnot. I'm sure if I scrolled down his wall I'd find plenty more that didn't get removed because nobody reported them. Facebook has to have some standards, and the way they enforce them is by being notified that they've been violated.

  • I am just happy that Ed isn't Facebookian; if he was some really rude people wouldn't be able to comment here–we know who we are, people!

  • The problem with the language police is that, every now and then, they knock on the door of someone who should be on the 'allowed list'.

  • Commenter earlier: "it’s unfortunate that Facebook came about as an owned entity, rather than an open, federated protocol (like the web, email, Usenet, etc.). It gives Zuckerberg’s faceless corporate meat-grinder way too much power. That ship has sailed, though."

    Nonsense. What people have wrought, people can unwrought. I say we apply eminent domain to our internet commons!

    /*quiet maniacal cackle*/

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