The Facebook Jail Waiting Room

I am in the waiting room of Facebook jail. The independent fact checkers have determined I have repeatedly shared false information that violates their community standards. Finding their community standards was a bit of a search. Once I found them I was left confused.

The actual posts were removed, so I am unable to see what they deemed unfit (not helpful). And while there is an appeal process I have used in the past, such an appeal is not available to me in this circumstance. Instead, for the next 90 days all my posts will appear in the cellar of the Facebook news feed. So keep on scrolling….

All this raises the question about the razor’s edge line between censorship and holding to some standard for sharing information. It feels a bit like the Facebook police just remove stuff they don’t like, but it is a lot more complicated than that. Monitoring millions of posts a day is a behemoth task at best. There are complicated algorithms to flag hot button words, misinformation, disinformation and the like. The person in charge of all this is Monika Bickert. According to Vanity Fair she is “…one of a handful of people, along with her counterparts at Google, with real power to dictate free speech norms for the entire world.” Fifteen thousand independent fact checkers (the Facebook police) and a constantly evolving set of community standards is how Facebook decides what is appropriate and what is not. It means that this handful of people has tremendous control over the information that is shared in the free world.

I don’t know about you, but this makes me very nervous.

Sharing false information is not something I knowingly do. And who decides if it’s false? And how do they decide this? I do my research and use sources I trust. On my personal page I share mostly comics, memes and articles I find interesting. I use the New York Times, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and writers like economist Robert Reich and biblical scholars like Walter Brueggemann. I don’t think they knowingly share misinformation either. The truth is that all publications have a spin. I just happen to like the spin of these publications. Apparently the Facebook police do not.

One article that appeared to be chopped by the Facebook police was by Robert Reich about inflation. He contends that inflation is being caused by the “concentration of the American economy into the hands of a relative few corporate giants with the power to raise prices.” This sounds about right to me and it has tremendous implications for companies like Facebook (now called Meta). Little wonder it disappeared on the cutting room floor of the Facebook police office.

The purpose of my writing is to explore the intersection of faith, politics and culture. I endeavor to be a voice of reasoned faith, progressive Christianity and moral centeredness in a world that is increasingly unmoored from its foundations. This apparently violates their community standards. Go figure.

When Jesus stood before Pilate on the eve of his crucifixion Jesus said: “I have come to testify to the truth. In response Pilate asked him, “What is truth?” It is a question we do well to ponder. What are the standards we use to evaluate information? Where do we get our information? If all publications have a spin, what is the spin that lines up with our values? Where are our values formed and how do we live them out?

There are many versions of the “truth” out there. It is up to us to listen through the cacophonous riot of information that assaults us every day and determine for ourselves what we will proclaim as truth.

The anchor in all this, as people of faith, is the gospel as revealed in Scripture. And here is where it gets dicey. You can prove almost anything by reading the bible. Anyone can take a verse out of context and use it as “proof” of a particular point.

Something more is asked of us, as people of faith. We are to be lifetime students of Scripture. The consistent message of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation is God’s unshakeable love for all humanity and creation, the unwavering call to a life of discipleship and obedience, a constant striving for a just world and an insatiable hunger for peace. This is the truth toward which all of Jesus’ life and teaching pointed. Of course, we may end up in Facebook Jail, and I guess that’s okay, I’ll take the truth of the gospel I believe with every fiber of my being no matter where I end up.