The Junior Orwell League Strikes Again.

Reblogged from Larry Correi’s Monster Hunter Nation.

This has just gotten silly.

Check the date. That comment was from a month and a half ago.  Basically if you ever attract the attention of an unscrupulous jackass, they can simply go through all your old posts and report everything as hate speech. Then Facebook, being a bunch of morons, will automatically, unthinkingly, reflexively block you.

I’ve been banned from Facebook a bunch of times now.  I believe that comment was me complaining about their dippy censorship (and was when I started investigating MeWe, because I really was tired of FB’s Junior Orwellian bullhsit) where anything a conservative or libertarian says Violates Community Standards and needs Snopes to fact check it, but anything a progressive or a socialist says is just great, even when they are literally threatening to murder you.

A month after I posted that comment above, I caught my first Facebook ban for hate speech, My crime? Pretending to be from one imaginary country of proud (but genocidal) sandwich makers, and insulting another imaginary country.  http://monsterhunternation.com/2019/08/13/another-example-why-facebook-is-super-dumb/

It was obviously the stupid Facebook bots, but my fans had a lot of fun with it.

But then, I caught another 3 day ban immediately after, and this is where our story starts to get nefarious:  http://monsterhunternation.com/2019/08/16/banned-again-facebook-gets-even-dumber-part-iii-the-saga-continues/

Because that one wasn’t bots with dumb code, that was a bunch of prog scumbags realizing that if they report my posts to Facebook, I just get auto blocked. We’ve even got screen shots of them bragging about it.

So I’ve been catching FB bans ever since, always for goofy crap. I got a 3 day ban last week. Why?  For talking about a scumbag  (Mike Glyer) who was pirating another author (said scumbag happens to own the same scumbag website where we got the last screen cap of them bragging about reporting me).

And the ban wasn’t even for the mean post where I actually insulted the pirate scumbag a bunch:

http://monsterhunternation.com/2019/09/16/another-example-why-i-think-mike-glyer-is-a-simpering-feculent-and-his-shitty-gossip-column-website-file-770-is-the-prolapsed-anus-of-fandom/

Oh no. That would make at least a little bit of sense. The ban was for a brief post the day before, where I tagged the author who was getting pirated to ask him for more info.  Pirating authors? Not a problem. Standing up to the scumbag doing the pirating? Violation of community standards.

And then today. Because apparently saying Facebook is Orwellian, will cause them to act Orwellian. Because hate speech? Or something. Hell if I know.

Basically what it comes down to is that if you ever come to the attention of scumbags, they can silence you on Facebook just by reporting all your posts. It doesn’t matter how innocuous the posts are, Facebook is stupid. I highly doubt any thinking humans ever actually look at any of this stuff.  Meanwhile, you can recruit child brides for ISIS terrorists while chanting death to the Jews, and Facebook says that’s totally cool. So it’s a teensy bit lopsided in its application.

It’s the Heckler’s Veto, only even more anonymous.  If you give a powerless chickenshit the ability to silence people they don’t like, without risk or repercussions, they’re  gonna use that power. It’s also a really good example of how Red Flag laws will inevitably be abused.

Like I said when I first started catching all these bans, I figure my days on Facebook are numbered. When mini painting posts are now Hate Speech, and pictures of my dog are Bullying. It is only a matter of time until I catch a perma-ban.

Now, I could do that silly thing where people make up fake EH accounts, but screw that. Facebook makes money off of me and my fans. I’m not going to reward them by working around their obnoxious bullshit, so that they can continue to mine our data.

The sad thing is that I spent years building up a fan base there. I’ve got one of the biggest and best (and actually functioning!) author fan pages on the internet.  And during most of that time, Facebook wasn’ttoo stupid.  It was bearably obnoxious.

But the stupid is becoming increasingly aggressive.  Now people want to leave, but they feel stuck. I’m not alone in this. Most content creators are in the same boat. We congregated our people there because it was convenient and then we became complacent. Now they think they own us, and can do whatever they want with impunity, because content creators don’t want to move away from where their fans are. So the abusive trailer park husband makes leaving hard, because he doesn’t hit you all the time, and he used to love you, and somebody needs to think of the kids.

I’m sure I’ve made a lot of sales off of Facebook.  Heck, my Book Bombs, most of the traffic for those comes from Facebook shares. And those are usually (by orders of magnitude) the biggest sales days of those authors’ careers.

So we stay in the abusive relationship with the incoherent alcoholic who occasionally beats us,  because of inertia.  And that’s just sad.

I’ve been transitioning more of my stuff over to MeWe. We’ve got a couple thousand people in the fan page over there now. But again, the sucky part of that is abandoning  a decade of community building and content. People don’t want to leave.

Here’s the thing though, the way things are going, you aren’t going to have a choice.  People like me are getting hit right now because the nail that sticks up has to be nailed down. I’m only a minor notable. (seriously, writer is like the lowest form of celebrity, right below Instagram gun bunny). But if random scumbags can control our ability to speak, it’s only a matter of time before they do it to everybody else.

So Facebook can either get its crap together, or let the Heckler’s Veto become their defacto working model. However, since Facebook is a giant evil megacorporation that only cares about prying into your life to sell your info to advertisers and to influence elections, good luck with that.

It’s a free market, Facebook is free to suck all they want, and we are free to leave once they become unbearable.