Facebook’s auto-censoring and the Oversight Board appeal pushing me off the platform for good

My Facebook account was put on restricted access because of the most absurd reason, detailed below. It has to do with Facebook’s implementation of an automated artificial intelligence-based approach to censoring content they deem inappropriate. I filed an appeal with the Oversight Board but it has sat there for three weeks now with no activity and no indication that the OB will take any action. What is maddening about this is that it is the second time this type of censorship/restriction process has happened to me, and it happened just this past September to users in a local community forum that I moderate on Facebook. The exact same situation. Again, all this is explained below.

A week after I filed the appeal, I deleted my account entirely. It will now sit there until the first week of April or so when it will be finally deleted for good, assuming I don’t log into it at some point and restart the clock all over again. Or the OB could do the right thing.

The Crime

On Feb 21, 2022, around 12pm mountain time I posted a picture to my FB feed that I intended as a humorous post, of a package of hot tamale flavored marshmallow peeps. We chanced upon this abomination in a local Walgreens.

My caption for the post was “No, no, no, no, no, no…For the love of all that is sacred, no!” It was a humorous post and understood as such by my friends, who commented witty replies of their own.

Then I also made a satirical comment, “I think I’ll have to go back and burn the place down.”

Boom! The autocensor was swift. Immediately a notification popped up that I had violated FB’s community standards. Nevermind that it should have been clear from all context, from all the other comments posted, that it was a humorous, no-harm-implied statement. My reply was deleted, my account put on restricted access, and all I could do was hit the “I disagree with this” button and hope for the best.

Priors

Facebook continues to automatically strike down the use of the phrase “burn it down” or similar without examining context. This previously happened to me back in May of 2021 when a friend shared a picture of a humongous spider in her garage (near Austin, Texas) and my comment to her was “Burn the place down!” It, too, was also immediately flagged as a community standards violation. I also “disagreed” with that decision and appealed it to the Oversight Board. In that instance, the Board declined to review it but magically, Facebook reversed its action soon after. I was down for a few days. I thought something similar would take place this time but as the weeks went on, I’m thinking Facebook simply doesn’t care how well their censors are working as long as ad revenue keeps streaming in.

More recently back in September in a local community forum I used to moderate in Santa Fe, New Mexico, someone shared a picture of our famous Zozobra character, a multiple story puppet that is burned every year around Labor Day in celebration of letting go of the previous year’s gloom. Think if it as our local Burning Man Festival, only this one has been going on every year since 1924. The personified cause of all our gloom is shown below.

People started commenting, “Burn him!” to the posted photo, as that is the chant that is heard during the actual celebration as he becomes engulfed in flames. (It is televised every year on local news stations and streamed online. Watch it if you get a chance.) Facebook immediately cited those commenters for violating community standards, which was just grossly negligent on Facebook’s part. As the forum moderator I was also notified that I had members that violated Facebook’s community standards but there was no option for me to give any feedback. I don’t know how many of them appealed or what happened afterwards, but it was yet another clear example of how screwed up their auto-censoring algorithms are.

Final Words

Two weeks have passed since I first wrote this and now my restricted access time is over. The worthless Oversight Board still hasn’t acted on the appeal and I was never able to reach anyone at Facebook to get a set of human eyes on the matter. Below is where the appeal sits as of 1:35 PM MDT. You can also see their refusal to take a look in the previous matter.