Facebook and Other Censorious Asshats

Curmie is indebted to Ken White at Popehat for the term “censorious asshat” that serves as part of the title of this piece.

Here’s the deal. When Curmie awoke this morning he checked in with Facebook, as usual. One of Curmie’s posts on the Facebook page had been deemed “false” by “an independent fact-checker,” specifically by that paradigm of journalistic mediocrity, USA Today. The offending meme, riffing on the anti-maskers, shows a soldier carrying a donkey across a field. The cutline reads:

This picture is from World War II, a soldier carrying a donkey. It is not that the soldier loves donkeys or has some sort of perversion. What’s happening is that the field is mined and that if the donkey was allowed to wonder [sic.] as it pleased, it would likely detonate a charge and kill everyone. The moral of the story is that during difficult times the first ones you have to keep under control are the jackasses who don’t understand the danger and do as they please.

Ah, but the geniuses who have no understanding of humor decided to point out that the photo wasn’t really from World War II. [I know, the horror!] OK, first off, Curmie doubts that anyone looking at that meme, especially anyone seeing it on Curmie’s page (I attract a pretty intelligent clientele, if I do say so myself), unquestioningly believed that the details provided in the meme were literal fact. They existed not to be regarded as truth, but to set up a joke. No one cares that it was really the French in Algeria, or even that the field wasn’t actually mined. Seriously, if we were talking about a gag that starts “A priest walks into a bar,” these morons would feel compelled to point out that there’s no solid evidence of such an event, that all we know is that the man was dressed as a priest, that it’s true that he entered but we don’t know if he walked, and really, it was more of a pub than a bar. Curmie also awaits Facebook’s revelation that Abraham Lincoln didn’t really say not to believe everything you see on the Internet.

Curmie would be pleased to send them all a box of laxative and get on with his day, except that having the post labelled as “false” means that Curmie’s posts, already seldom seen by more than 10% of the people who like his page, will show up on the feeds of even fewer folks who don’t actively seek out his posts. Oh, by the way, the photo you see here: taken from someone else’s Facebook page; there’s no disclaimer on that page. Ah, equity…

This is, by the way, the third time Curmie’s posts have been questioned. In one of the other cases, Curmie did post something from a clearly partisan source that seemed at the time to be a little devoid of context. It was not intentionally misleading (on my part, at least), and indeed the “ruling” from the Grand Poobahs of fact-checking was only “partly false.” Still, it was a moment of intellectual laziness, and Curmie was rightly dinged for it.

The other time, Curmie posted something that looked interesting but a little suspicious: and he said so, specifically requesting his readers who knew more about the subject would help separate fact from fiction. Ah, but he posted something that turned out to be incompletely contextualized (fact-checkers care about context when it suits them to do so; otherwise, they’re the quintessence of literality). The fact that Curmie labelled it as questionable is irrelevant to the bot that enforces the “rulings” of PolitiFact (or whoever). [Note: Curmie has had his issues with PolitiFact in particular for some time. See here, here, and here, for example.]

Of course, there’s one category of posters who aren’t subject to Facebook’s faux interest in the truth: politicians and their minions. It’s right there on FB’s self-righteous ”Business Help Center” page:

Posts and ads from politicians are generally not subjected to fact-checking. In evaluating when this applies we ask our fact-checking partners to look at politicians at every level. This means candidates running for office, current office holders - and, by extension, many of their cabinet appointees - along with political parties and their leaders.

Why, you ask? Well, free speech, of course! A candidate for office is even allowed to post outright lies: “If a claim is made directly by a politician on their Page, in an ad or on their website, it is considered direct speech and ineligible for our third party fact checking program — even if the substance of that claim has been debunked elsewhere.” Riiiiiiiiiiight. Trump or Biden or their respective parties can repeat nonsense that was proven to be false months ago—and a). it’s actual mendacity rather than a misinterpretation or an unintentional omission of context, and b). the falseness of the statement is actually relevant—but the likes of Curmie will be censured because a joke meme misidentifies a soldier in a way that doesn’t change a thing.

Still, not to worry. Surely only three such instances (even if two of them shouldn’t count at all) over a period of several months shouldn’t make much difference, right? Well, this is Facebook, so who knows.

But the day’s saga doesn’t end there, Gentle Reader. It’s Thursday, and Curmie has taken to posting reminders on Wednesday or Thursday to remind Curmiphiles to vote for the Political Asshole of the Week. So I went to the Facebook page to re-post last Saturday’s link. Gone. Indeed, Sunday’s post had disappeared, as well. In fact, I can’t post anything from this blog, either to the Curmudgeon Central page or on my own personal page. Of course, I received literally no notification that (or when) the posts had been removed. When I went to post directly from the blog to either of my Facebook personae’s pages, I got a pop-up that said it was a violation of Facebook’s community standards. That’s it. Nothing more specific than that, and not just the inability to post a particular article, but to post literally anything from manjushri924.blogspot.com. I honestly have no idea what’s going on. Curmie has never advocated violence or criminality, and whereas there’s some adult language now and then, the blog itself is behind a warning that “This post may contain sensitive content.” You’ve got to say you’re OK with that to see the posts themselves.

Were I of a cynical disposition, of course (perish the thought!), I’d suspect that some pol who got nominated as Political Asshole of the Week decided to throw his weight around. Oh, by the way, the fun folks at Opinion Stage shut down the poll because it’s been seen too many times? Yeah, right. The days when Blogspot had their own polling apparatus are missed. Or perhaps it’s time to migrate to another platform? We shall see…

Anyway, readership here will likely go down, as Facebook has been the principal means by which most readers find their way here. But Curmie writes mostly for himself, anyway, to keep his writing skills sharp and to clarify his own thinking on matters of the day. And who knows? Maybe someday Curmie will be told what exactly is so offensive about this blog, so he can either fix it or tell Zuckerberg to perform an action best suited to particularly limber hermaphrodites. In the meantime, Curmie will try to revive his dormant Twitter account to announce his blog posts, to continue to post to his Facebook page but list this page as manjushri924 dot blogspot dot com in doing so, and to urge you to follow this page directly. Oh, and to try to figure out how to do the Political Asshole of the Week poll without having to pay for it.