Going to pick on Facebook’s filters a bit more
So one of the things you may not know about me is I ran for city council a couple of years back, I also am an admin of a local group that deals with our voting district (after I ran for council, not during, no conflict I swear,) and I was the president of the neighborhood association for one of the neighborhoods in our voting district (former now, but still active.)
I have no political aspirations here, just want sidewalks and for stupid ass businesses to stop getting into firefights 500 feet from my sleeping kid’s bedroom window. Other things as well. Trying to make the place a better place.
One of the ways I really attempt that is by setting up posts when we’ve got weather crisis going on. Yesterday there were 80mph winds barreling down on our neighborhood, tornado watches, and otherwise extreme get to shelter level events. Usually when these hit we’ve got hackberry trees down, police stuck sitting next to line downs for hours, people without power who need help, phones dying, you know, pretty simple stuff that someone with a chainsaw and a large collection of previously reviewed portable power banks can provide.
Yes, several of the power banks we’ve reviewed have been involved in the past.
Need help / offering help / need to pay for help / offering to assist for pay threads get set up during and after severe weather events. We force a distinction after a couple of years realizing that people are getting 1) scammed by the word help, 2) not understanding that some people offering help expect money, 3) you get it. Remove ambiguity and scam potential, connect those in need with those who can help.
Community posts get set up with direction that if you’re offering services for money you need to very explicitly say this. If you’re offering to help out a neighbor and don’t expect a dime you also need to say this. This prevents people from scamming others because we also have a lot of scammers pop out of the woodwork, ask for $100, say they’ve got to go get gas for their chainsaw, and then leave never to be seen again.
What happened on the 11th was I posted a Twitter link as a councilmember was talking about getting the bivalent covid booster. One of the big Q conspiracies was that on October 10, 2022 the toxins would get activated and everyone was going to die. There was a thread on Twitter on the 11th asking what timezone, whether they’d factored in leap year, and all sorts of “how does it feel to be dead” commentary. There was nothing evident in any of the posts that anyone believed this and were doing anything but being silly.
I posted that to the councilmember who had not heard of the whole 10-10 shebang, and was subsequently blocked from posting for about 27 hours for spreading information that could potentially harm others. That information as far as I could tell was that people had not died the previous couple of days.
I don’t know why it was around 27 hours, but my ban ended at 3something AM this morning and I had gone to bed before midnight on the night I posted the link. This ban lead through the tornado level event and I had the other group admins 1) on vacation, 2) not responding, so 3) any group response was going to be me having someone post on my behalf and I could pin it and message people to respond to a particular person with “Paul said…”
Attempts to provide feedback or reach anyone at Facebook were met with the notice that something went wrong and to try again later.
The storm hit Nashville at about 5, we had a couple of trees go down and some roof damage but thankfully my neighborhood was not destroyed this time.
While I do not claim I provide a great and valuable service to the neighborhood, I connect needs with helpers in times of crises, it was interesting to see said service in potential time of need sidelined and no way to un-sideline it because once again Facebook got it wrong. Not only did they get it wrong, they’ve engineered a “sorry something went wrong” trap to prevent you from actually contacting them. Yeah, what went wrong is your AI Facebook.
I have now been flagged by Facebook for violent or potentially harmful content twice this year. Once for talking about how “Yes, and…” an improv game, can be modified to not work / go negative with a few words after (the “yes, and… but”) and provided a few examples. Yeah, you saw the word “stab” FB… good job taking a stab at it as that was literally the phrasing. *sigh*
Anyhow, violent and harmful content two striker here…
