Facebook Still Deleting Non-Offensive Posts For Being Offensive

from the the-best-defense dept

Another day, another example of Facebook's attempt at applying automated morality going poorly. For a site designed for little else beyond expressive speech, I suppose some erroneous applications of any kind of puritanism would go awry. Perhaps then you might have forgiven Facebook's mistaking a children's illustration for man-horse-fucking, or the algorithm's inability to recognize satire.

But you would think that, in the wake of the tragic shooting that occurred at a nightclub in Orlando, one member of the LGBT community's perfectly cogent and innocuous rant wouldn't be gobbled up the by censor algorithm as being offensive. Here is the author's tweet complaining about its removal (twice), including a screenshot of the text, so that you can get an idea of what was taken down.

After removing the post a second time, Facebook apparently banned the author from doing anything else on the site for three days. That notice pretty clearly implies that the author had shared some kind of child pornography. Which wasn't true. The entirety of the post was text, imploring society to start to treat the LGBT community with a greater deal of respect. And, whatever your thoughts on the text of that post might be, certainly it is not something that should have been taken down as offensive, nevermind as any kind of pornography.

Look, I poke fun at Facebook over its morality attempts because it's funny, but I don't expect the site to be perfect. Still, when the censors are gobbling up legitimate viewpoints basically devoid of anything offensive as offensive, then perhaps we're better off with no filters at all.

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Filed Under: censorship, morality police, orlando
Companies: facebook