Facebook Moderation: Goofy, Stupid, or Just Irresponsible?
By Corporal Punishmenton 05/15/2025 |
MajorGeeks has had a Facebook page since right around the time it was launched. It's a love-hate relationship with us. Facebook used to be very pro-publisher but has morphed into a bureaucratic, money-hungry nightmare. But, it's still a semi-denct way to reach the Geek Army - so we still post. Over that time, we have made tens of thousands of posts and had no problems. However, we got flagged on Facebook today for something we posted two years ago—yes, TWO years.
Logging in today, we got a warning that somehow, Facebook's system decided we were promoting suicide/self-harm. Really? That's ridiculous.
Not only did they flag us and warn us not to do it again, but they removed the image before we could even see what we were being accused of. This gave us zero opportunity to know what we needed to defend ourselves against. Fortunately, as most Geeks do, we save everything. So we had to dig through old posts, messages, and Facebook's clunky content backend to figure out what got us in trouble. That took over an hour. Thanks for that waste of time, Mark.
To be clear, we'd never joke about anything serious like suicide. People have enough problems in this world without us adding to them. We keep it clean. We keep it real. We keep it geeky.
Now that Facebook has fired its moderators in an attempt to go to the X-style community notes, the moderation system apparently relies more on AI than common sense, and AI can't detect sarcasm. Hell, it can barely draw a hand. There have been instances where people have been banned for saying they would "kill their phone" if autocorrect didn't keep messing up. Or banned for hate speech in a casual conversation. I get algortythins. I get there's a task to try nd moderate all this. But foolhardy mistakes like this make it harder for real safety concerns to be taken seriously. It's simply ludicrous to think we would, and we are personally offended that Facebook would insinuate such nonsense. If you accuse someone of promotiing suicide you better back that sh*t up. Who do we hold accountable for such an offence to our name and reputation? No one has the courage to list support mail to respond to such a thing. The only thing offered is a button to click that you disagree.
We aren't alone; horror stories are everywhere about horrid Facebook moderation. My favorite is when Facebook mistook a seed company's photo of their onions (Look at these onions!) as sexual content and removed the page. But you can check out a ton more at TechDirt
Ok, enough rant.
Here's the image of the accusation and the image that was flagged. You be the judge. What do you geeks think? Is it funny? Suicidal? Do you have a story of your own? Let us know.
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Logging in today, we got a warning that somehow, Facebook's system decided we were promoting suicide/self-harm. Really? That's ridiculous.
Not only did they flag us and warn us not to do it again, but they removed the image before we could even see what we were being accused of. This gave us zero opportunity to know what we needed to defend ourselves against. Fortunately, as most Geeks do, we save everything. So we had to dig through old posts, messages, and Facebook's clunky content backend to figure out what got us in trouble. That took over an hour. Thanks for that waste of time, Mark.
To be clear, we'd never joke about anything serious like suicide. People have enough problems in this world without us adding to them. We keep it clean. We keep it real. We keep it geeky.
Now that Facebook has fired its moderators in an attempt to go to the X-style community notes, the moderation system apparently relies more on AI than common sense, and AI can't detect sarcasm. Hell, it can barely draw a hand. There have been instances where people have been banned for saying they would "kill their phone" if autocorrect didn't keep messing up. Or banned for hate speech in a casual conversation. I get algortythins. I get there's a task to try nd moderate all this. But foolhardy mistakes like this make it harder for real safety concerns to be taken seriously. It's simply ludicrous to think we would, and we are personally offended that Facebook would insinuate such nonsense. If you accuse someone of promotiing suicide you better back that sh*t up. Who do we hold accountable for such an offence to our name and reputation? No one has the courage to list support mail to respond to such a thing. The only thing offered is a button to click that you disagree.
We aren't alone; horror stories are everywhere about horrid Facebook moderation. My favorite is when Facebook mistook a seed company's photo of their onions (Look at these onions!) as sexual content and removed the page. But you can check out a ton more at TechDirt
Ok, enough rant.
Here's the image of the accusation and the image that was flagged. You be the judge. What do you geeks think? Is it funny? Suicidal? Do you have a story of your own? Let us know.
comments powered by Disqus
