Thanks Wikipedia
Anyhow…
What’s up Facebook and Twitter. I hear you are trying to control what we read and see? Are you saying we have had too much to think…and you have to cut us off?
Someone asked me to write a blog about Facebook and Twitter shadow banning. There have been a lot of reports out lately of you elite tech overlords “shadow banning” specific topics or groups of people like marijuana even including some Government pages.
I have been reading and hearing about it and I just don’t really care about it at the moment. I don’t believe the news anymore and things on the internet and I don’t use Facebook or Twitter. Some would say that makes one socially inept and somewhat a criminal. I say GFY.
Shadow banning, shunning, exiling, manipulation, agenda, propaganda whatever you want to call it. It’s been going on in some shape or form since the dawn of man…whoops…humans…whoops..people or whatever we are today.
I am just going to post the article someone found and forwarded to me and give the writer all the credit. Because it’s Monday and I just don’t give a crap today to have to think about this and all the BS that is being spewed from so many orafices on the TV, radio, internet and office talk.
I am taking the rest of the day off as a “mental health day” in a safe space without my tethering gadgets. In other words I will be relaxing in the pool – in the deep end – without my phone, tablet or laptop with friends.
This is the article someone sent. probably because we are a criminal defense law firm that focuses on marijuana and medical marijuana charges in Michigan.
Here’s the article…
Is Facebook Shadow Banning Marijuana Pages, Including Government Ones?
August 1, 2018
Chris RobertsSomething’s up with Facebook and marijuana—again.
Recently, pages with “marijuana” and “cannabis” in their names stopped appearing in search results.
The pages are still active and can be found via direct links, but users without the URLs or bookmarks are out of luck, leading to questions about whether the social network is “shadow banning” the pages.
Facebook has yet to offer an explanation for this snafu, which is, for example, affecting the page for the California Bureau of Cannabis Control, the official government agency that regulates the state’s multi billion-dollar industry, as well as cannabis-focused media outlets like Marijuana Moment and Marijuana Business Daily and nonprofit advocacy groups like the Marijuana Policy Project.
Wow. Facebook is shadow-banning @BCCinfo_dca, the California state agency regulating cannabis, putting it on the same level as InfoWars. pic.twitter.com/rFipqeWSSa
— Sylvia Chi, Esq. (@sylviachiesq) July 31, 2018
A “shadow ban” is the term used for when a user’s web resource–a social-media page or a web-forum post–isn’t deleted or blocked, but is only visible to the individual user.
Since 2014, when legal marijuana marketplaces opened up in Washington and Colorado, all major social networks declared cannabis-related ads verboten. To this day, significant limitations remain.
Advertisements for marijuana businesses or advocating cannabis use are regularly blocked on Facebook and other social-media websites—including Instagram, which is also a Facebook property—for violating community standards, which ban the sale of “illegal drugs.”
Algorithms often block promotions for news articles or other noncommercial posts that merely mention “marijuana” or “cannabis,” a situation that often requires lengthy appeals processes to clear automatically flagged content that doesn’t actually violate terms of service.
Last year, Twitter, which has more than 330 million active monthly users, briefly blocked all searches on its site for “marijuana.”
But this may be the first time access to a government agency’s marijuana-related page has been interrupted in this way.
In this case, the disruption is significant: Marijuana industry attorneys, entrepreneurs and businesspeople rely on BCC’s Facebook page for notices of upcoming meetings and for easy access to the latest iteration of the state’s lengthy and complication rules for the marijuana industry.
BCC staff are aware of the issue and have contacted Facebook for an explanation, but have yet to receive one.
“We have reached out to Facebook with no response so far,” BCC spokesman Alex Traverso said in an email to Marijuana Moment. “This is the first time something like this has happened. In fact, we’ve even done promoted posts on Facebook before without any issue.”
Reached via email, a spokesperson for Facebook asked for more information about the situation. After it was provided, the spokesperson did not respond to further requests for comment.
“It’s clear that something’s happened,” said Sylvia Chi, an Oakland, California-based attorney with clients in the marijuana space. “But it’s not clear what.”
It’s not just BCC; this “shadowban” seems to work by not surfacing any page that has “cannabis” or “marijuana” in the title through Facebook’s search, EXCEPT on the Facebook app for iOS. Other affected pages include @NCIAorg@MarijuanaPolicy, @MarijuanaMoment, and @MJBizDaily.
— Sylvia Chi, Esq. (@sylviachiesq) August 1, 2018
Users accessing Facebook via the iOS app have been able to find cannabis-related pages they already follow on the main search results tab, but tapping the “Pages” tab yields an empty result.
Chi theorized that the snafu is a “bug” or glitch rather than a conscious choice to de-list or shadow ban marijuana pages.
Facebook has in the past been criticized for inconsistent, incoherent and unrealistic community guidelines. Until 2016, users were able to conduct firearms transactions. And critics have faulted the social network for its inability to police hate speech, including posts and pages from white-supremacist organizations.
“I think their community standards around marijuana are problematic,” said Chi, who noted Facebook had earlier this year updated its guidelines to prohibit minors from seeing advertisements of gun accessories. “It seems like they could do the same thing for marijuana, but just don’t want to.”
You’re welcome for the BLs
Here are some more articles on the internet.
Google News Search on Shadow Banning…Unless they shadow banned your search.
