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It appears that Meta's AI is using Group administration tools to covertly throttle messages that might be contrary to Zuck's preferences.
Facebook has a pretty impressive section called Groups. In it you can find associations of people with a vast array of mutual interests ranging from health conditions like diabetes or a variety of other ailments to the usual array of political opinions to more obscure but enjoyable things like manhole covers from around the world—some of those manhole covers are works of art.
All in all this system is part of the environment Meta has built to keep us literally scrolling forever. Groups have an assortment of control points for administrators to care for, nurture and grow their groups. They can make them public, private or even hidden, accessible only by invitation. All the groups allow admins and moderators to allow or disallow content in the group according to each group’s established rules. Admins can even ban people who abuse the rules intentionally or try to rile up members—trolls.
I participate in a number of groups for political content as well as other interests, some just as a member and a few as moderator, admin or founder. Over the past couple of months I’ve noticed a sea change in how Facebook has been increasingly putting a thumb on the scales of content sharing in groups. One thing that can be lost sight of in Facebook Groups is that everything on Facebook belongs to Facebook. Literally. This is their universe, not ours.
Back in August is where I saw a change begin. I had a routine of sharing a couple of posts widely in various groups. Some of them were pretty large, the biggest had well over 500,000 members. At first all my posts were being automatically approved and were visible to all of the members. After August 25th, that stopped. I thought it odd and went to the membership panel which normally shows who the admins in a group are and allows you to message them. When I looked there were no admins listed at all. Later an admin showed up in the listing but FB told me I was not allowed to message that account. Pretty weird.
Then I started to see similar behavior in other groups. Also on August 25th. My posts were not going through and were piling up in a “Pending Approval” queue. The rat smell was getting stronger.
I started to get more of a clue when I saw more posts showing up in my “Pending Approval” list in smaller groups that I managed. There was nothing wrong with these posts and they were all from members who had great reputations for posting relevant materials consistently. I also saw posts from these same people showing up as “Suspected Spam.”
It slowly dawned on me what Facebook’s AI was doing—I can only assume this is their AI, because this level of human interaction would be very expensive. By flagging content in groups as needing approval or suspected spam they could slow down the posting of various content categories.
I admin one group that has over 30,000 members and some smaller ones. I can tell you that in the larger one, it does take a bit of attention span to go through posts in these buckets to get everyone’s messages through. So imagine the load on admins for groups whose memberships ranged in the hundreds of thousands.
Maybe Meta’s programmers had the idea of forcing group admins to really administrate. But I’m not so sure.
Many of the groups I participate in are left-leaning politically and decidedly against the radical right turn the country is taking under Trump and his cronies.
Unfortunately it is a leap of assumption that Meta’s AI has been programmed to throttle liberal voices. There’s no way for me to know that right now. But it sure feels that way. Perhaps others can give me some clues or observations on that front.
In the mean time, it appears that Meta’s AI is using Group administration tools to covertly throttle messages that are possibly contrary to Zuck’s preferences. This is what the far right would have been screaming about as violations of free speech, while calling for people to be discriminated against, harmed or killed.
The thing always to remember is that when it comes to Facebook, you are on Mark Zuckerberg’s turf. When Facebook was banning the likes of Donald Trump because of his efforts to incite violence many rejoiced. But now the worm has turned and Trump is the honcho that our Tech Bros like Zuck, Musk and Eilison now have to answer to, just like Russia’s fat cats had to kowtow to Putin. Keep these things in mind and act accordingly.
Luckily there is no shortage of people forming new rapidly growing groups. Keep communicating, keep messaging, keep resisting. As has been said with increasing frequency since January 20, it is all up to us now.
Marty Kassowitz
Marty Kassowitz is co-founder of Factkeepers. As founder of Interest Factory and View360, he brings more than 30 years experience in effective online communications, social media management, and platform development to the site. He is a writer, designer, editor and long time observer of the ill-logic demonstrated by too many members of the species known as Mankind. After a long history of somewhat private commentary on a subject he totally hates: politics, Marty was encouraged to build this site and put up his own analyses as well as curate relevant content from other sources.
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