I wasn't planning on doing a bonus second update today, but then I got banned from Facebook for the following comment in a conversation with a friend:
I know, I know, this is yet another example of me complaining about my social media bans but I am not an isolated example of this - if you think I am, explain why more and more people have started using the Orwellian euphemism 'unalive' to get around Facebook's filters. People don't start resorting to solutions that ugly unless things are fucked. The fact is this system of using keywords to trigger moderation is utterly unfit for any purpose other than allowing the social networks to claim they are doing something about the hate speech and abuse that their platforms enable. Never mind that this system doesn't understand the complexity of speech and language use, or the cultural significance of hyperbole in certain kinds of discourse (especially internet discourse). Never mind that it lets people get away with genuine hate speech of the worst kind as long as they're smart enough, cowardly and conniving enough, to refrain from using the trigger words. Never mind that it has blatantly been done in the cheapest, most cack-handed way possible because the internet will always be shit under capitalism - the important thing is that when Mark Zuckerberg next rocks up at some gathering of the global great and good to try and convince us that we all want to live in his shit Matrix full of dickless twerps, he can also say, when a reporter who's probably married to one of his mates tees up a softball question for him about what Facebook is doing to tackle hate speech, that they are doing something. Then he can go off and tell his new best chum Joe Rogan how he loves a sweaty grapple.
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| My super-sophisticated proprietary AI has created this picture of how Mark Zuckerberg sees himself in his mind |
I have no doubt that the distribution of these kind of bans is not equal. Bad actors, particularly on the political right, are notorious for abusing regulatory mechanisms to target people who speak out against them - a case in point being the co-ordinated campaign of complaints to the Charity Commission about Mermaids, organised by the usual terverted suspects. Being able to game systems is a smart way to get around the fact that actually most people don't support your fascist policies (see the frankly atrocious acts of jerrymandering Republican State Legislatures engage in to keep their states red for another example). This is even easier to do on social media, and is one reason why these platforms have become a real drag to use for anyone on the real political left. Which is of course one reason why the same people who normally bleat all day about how pointing out that wealthy British merchants once owned slaves is somehow censorship have been surprisingly silent about this new threat - because those guys are all about censorship when it comes to voices that dissent from their own.
I doubt it's going to stay that way, though. For one thing, as it becomes more known how easy it is to abuse this system, it will start being abused to target people other than just us minorities and the left. It's chillingly simple to see how easily this could be used by school bullies to isolate their victims (presumably the bullying will start with schoolyard mockery of the kid for being on a platform as uncool as Facebook to start with, followed by a gang sign-up to mass-report the poor sod. Maybe Zuckerberg is counting on this to compensate for the exodus from his platform. God knows the Metaverse won't save it.).
And anyway, no matter how many or what type of people wind up getting targeted by this, the fact is it's a crime against language. Against expression. There are plenty of verbal contexts in which people will say things which denotatively look like threats of violence but which connotatively are expressions of affection. Are we all to guard against using these phrases, lest they be picked up by some cybernetic censor? We've already arrived at a situation where the word 'unalive' is a thing - what other ugly newspeak byblows will be birthed through this straitening grip? Where does poetry fit into all this? I sometimes post my poems as Facebook statuses when I'm drafting them: if I'd done that with DWP, the poem I posted here yesterday, I'd probably have been banned a day early.
And why should we let them do this to us? The thing I keep coming back to is the promises that social media made: that it would give us a fun new way to keep in touch with our existing friends, and to make new ones. And for a while it was what it had promised to be. But it hasn't been for a while really, has it? Now we pay for the 'privilege' of joking around with our mates by being exposed to post after post of adverts and clickbait and self-promotion. And now they're trying to police the figures of speech we use when talking to each other. Removing hate speech is one thing (and it would be really nice if they actually tried doing that sometime), but banning any and all words associated with death? That's the action of a tyrant who is not long for this world. And it isn't just me saying that - as Ryan Broderick points out in the new edition of his newsletter, Garbage Day, in the context of what Twitter will become if Elon Musk succeeds in acquiring it, 'it's worth beginning to dream about what new, better platforms we could use as a "digital public square" after we finally give up on' that social network.
And if Twitter is on the verge of a mass resignation of everyone except the Musksuckers, what hope is there for Zuckerberg's terminally unhip platform? It won't be sexless Weebles who can't even fist-bump convincingly, that's for sure. And it won't be the platform's worsening digital squeamishness either. In fact, while the former will only stop people signing up to his new venture, the latter could be what kills his former golden goose stone dead.
Which, of course, I'd never be allowed to say on Facebook.
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