A Moderate Democrat Speaks… NSFW obviously
Nationwide Democrat Protests Yesterday
Apologies, but this post is more in service to my Facebook audience than my IPR visitors. It’s mostly about hiding a video from the META Community Standards watchdogs. I know there’s been talk about ending the decades of FB censorship — the bannings of posts, the shadow banning of pages, the suspensions, the mysteriously ignorant corrections, et al — but ask anyone who’s been under the gun at the one social network that doesn’t limit the number of characters in a post (i.e., a monopoly resource) whether anything has really changed. Fewer blatant interventions, perhaps, but the worst suppressions continue unaddressed.
Posts with unacceptable trigger words suddenly can’t be saved. Some posts take days to show up in the Newsfeed of regular readers if they show up at all. Autocorrect (AC) is actually growing steadily worse as an impediment to posting, with clumsy corrections that make it harder to write more than a couple sentences without having to undo them. One supremely indicative example: Despite an irrational insistence by AC that certain words are always used with initial caps (e.g., justice), any typo in the word ‘Trump’ is flagged with a correct spelling but never an initial cap. This means, of course, that the correction has to be dismissed, and backspacing and retyping are required to finish putting in the name of the President in just under three times the seconds it should have taken. In fact, other proper names are similarly lowercased in corrections, and if some proper name has just become a story, AC frequently ‘corrects’ it to a differently spelled, more famous name, sometimes after a camouflaging delay, as if they know what you’re thinking and don’t even need to bother you with it. Words are systematically misdirected (stupidly? maliciously?) so that “were” always becomes “we’re,” and “its” always becomes “it’s.”
Proof that FB has its own proprietary version of Autocorrect is their newest time-saving ‘improvement’ feature. Any word that may be a component of one of your FB friends automatically prompts you to insert the friend’s name and page link. This too sometimes gets done even after you have you declined the prompt.
This apparent intent to facilitate more dialogue between FB friends is belied by a change put in place some years ago without ever being announced or repealed. Here’s how it works. You post about a link to some Internet url and introduce the link by explaining why and how you think it’s relevant to your friends. Fine. Looks good on your page. What happens when someone wants to share your post with their friends? Routinely, the intro written by you does not accompany the shared link when it arrives at its destination. (This does not happen with post containing image files, just other sites…) In other words, only the citation of another Internet address is regarded by FB as valuable. Which eliminates the possibility of discussion threads framed around your own reason for posting the link in the first place. They don’t want us to have conversations, just exchanges of Likes and emojis.
There’s also no sign that FB has suspended its neo-Victorian ban on female nudity in posted images, even though four-letter words used in purely political contexts are not routinely, censored, flagged or warned about. This doesn’t mean the Community Standards fascists aren’t keeping track of foul language usage they don’t like and aren’t continuously adjusting the level of shadow-banning habitual offenders receive.
Why this pair of videos is being hidden here. They might permit them to be posted, but the punishment that follows may be invisible and more pernicious than an outright penalty. There are two videos because Blogger pretends anything longer than one minute of video consumes more than 100MB of storage. Which is ridiculous. But we’re all living with the accumulating junk revisions in the software individual apps make us use. Note that while USAID gives hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to ‘corporate communication companies,’ we’ve never seen an report that helpful fenders funds have been allocated to fixing the monumental incompetence of Autocorrect that adds unknown millions of hours to the time individual users require to publish their posts.
Anyhow. Here you go. This rant by a moderate Democrat includes a lot of F-bombs, and way more than that even. Which makes it funny but evidently sincere and kind of touching. Why I’m saving it here for posterity. If you’re offended by a lot of a lot of F-bombs, don’t watch.
Sorry if I’ve wasted your time…
PART 1
PART 2
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