Falsely Accused by Facebook: Like Déjà vu All Over Again
Wrongly accused of violating Facebook Community Standards my page was restored on appeal with an apology. Then Facebook warned me to never again do what I never did.
June 29, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae
Some time ago, I wrote an article for Linkedin Pulse entitled, “Gene Roddenberry and Captain Kirk’s Star Trek Epiphany.” It was an odd blend of science fiction and faith. Linkedin users loved it — even some who were never Star Trek fans. It told the story of my childhood affinity for Star Trek which first entered our collective consciousness when I was 13 years old in 1966.
Actor Wil Wheaton caught my attention recently when he had a terrific essay published in the “Gears & Gadgets” section of The Wall Street Journal. A self-described geek, Mr. Wheaton played a somewhat cooler geek as Ensign Wesley Crusher in the 1980s Star Trek revival series, “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” My own geekness survived into adulthood so I saw every episode twice.
Since then, several additions to the Star Trek franchise have come and gone. My all-time favorite is the current one, Star Trek Discovery, a streaming series now in its third season. Prisoners do not have access to streaming television, but someone donated the DVDs for seasons one and two for broadcast on this prison’s in-house closed circuit channel.
But I’m off topic already. Wil Wheaton’s WSJ essay was “When Did We Lose the Internet?” (WSJ June 4-5, 2022). It was about how the Internet has evolved from his days as a young blogger in the early 1990s on Greymatter created by and named for Noah Grey. Wheaton wrote of Mr. Grey’s habit of personally assisting users:
“Can you imagine emailing Mark Zuckerberg any time you had a problem with Facebook? Now imagine him immediately fixing it.”
I have actually tried to imagine that. Facebook today boasts of having two billion users worldwide. I am one of them, but a reluctant and atypical one. I have never actually seen Facebook, but there is a page there for me and Beyond These Stone Walls that was created and maintained by our editor. I do not have a cat so readers will never see photos of my cat, but by some miracle my page has thousands of followers.
My entire Facebook experience involves simply posting my weekly post with help from our editor. My posts are then shared to a number of Catholic and prolife Facebook groups around the world. By posting to groups like CatholicismRocks and Catholic News Agency this humble blog reaches tens of thousands of readers.
Beyond These Stone Walls is not at all dependent on Facebook for readers, however. Those who come to the site from Facebook each week constitute less than ten percent of the readers of this blog. The vast majority come with “no referring link,” meaning that they subscribe directly (which is free and something I hope everyone will do).
In early March, 2022, I received an ominous message from Facebook that my account has been suspended and I am henceforth banned from posting, sharing, or commenting due to “violations of Facebook’s Community Standards.” I had no idea how this happened. So again with help, I reviewed the Community Standards and could not find any that I had ever violated.
From there, the story gets a little comical. At least, it would be comical if it were not also so frustrating. It was my first experience of pleading my case before an algorithm instead of a human person. I first wrote of this in another Linkedin article, “Banned by Facebook for a True Story of Anti-Catholic Oppression.”
The Facebook Oversight Board
It turned out that the offending post was one that I had written a decade ago. Facebook had no issue with it then. But when it was linked in another, newer post, it seriously riled Facebook’s Orwellian algorithm. The link was to a true story of anti-Catholic oppression that I had written back in 2011. It has been hiding in plain sight ever since. You may judge it for yourself. My banishment was because of “Catholic Scandal and the Third Reich: Rise and Fall of a Moral Panic.”
That post was an entirely true and fully documented account of false witness in 1939 Germany. Angered over an anti-Nazi document bravely published by Pope Pius XI, Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, falsely accused over 300 German Catholic priests of sexual abuse and arrested them all. It was a demonic effort to silence the Church. In the end, all but three were acquitted and exonerated because the German courts had not yet fallen into lockstep with the Nazi regime. The post opened with a quote from Hitler himself: “The great mass of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.”
Somehow, Facebook’s algorithm immediately detected this mention of Hitler and his quote, and determined it — and me — to be socially and culturally dangerous. So Facebook froze my account. We appealed that decision in a lengthy process that rivaled any state or federal appeal I have encountered before or since.
Anyone who has ever taken the time to endure a Facebook Oversight Board appeal knows firsthand what I was up against. The aura of suspicion and prejudice was a reminder of all I have witnessed in state or federal courts. With help, I completed a multitude of forms and answered page after page of probing questions such as “What was your motivation in writing this offending material?”
Finally, I was asked what community purpose the questioned post served. I explained that the Catholic Church has been rocked by allegations of often decades-old abuse in multiple countries, and reviewing all aspects of this phenomenon is in the best interests of the Catholic community. I then asked the Oversight Board to simply read the post instead of reacting to the algorithm’s rejection of it. Apparently someone did read it. We received this reply from the Facebook Oversight Board a week later:
“Sorry that we did not get this right. Our review of your post indicates that you did not violate Facebook Community Standards. Your post has been restored. Thank you for taking the time to appeal this matter and assist us in our continuing efforts to assure the safety of the Facebook forum.”
There were no angels singing the Alleluia Chorus. I actually did not care at all what Facebook concluded from my posts. My concern was for the Catholic groups that choose that forum to communicate with other members. I estimate that our posts reach about 200,000 people in those groups, and I was not keen on abandoning them to the usual Facebook fare.
But it wasn’t over. The Oversight Board restored the post within 12 days of discovering it. But Facebook did not restore my account. For the next 30 days it remained visible, but inactive meaning that we could not post or comment. Then for another ninety days Facebook censured all our posts by preventing them from being shared on the newsfeed for each of the Catholic and pro-life groups we had joined. The Facebook fiasco finally ended on June 5, 2022 which also just happened to be the Solemnity of Pentecost and my 40th anniversary of priesthood ordination. So my last post to be suppressed was “Forty Years of Priesthood in the Mighty Wind of Pentecost.”
Metaverse Madness and Independence Day
One week later, when our editor checked our Facebook account status, the following message popped up: “Your account has been fully restored. If you violate Facebook’s Community standards again your account will risk being permanently suspended.” Facebook is now ever ready to penalize me for again doing what I never did in the first place.
At the same time, we received an email message from some unknown, even darker entity claiming to represent Facebook. It informed us that our account is “almost fully restored, but we need your account information and passwords to complete the restoration.” This was, of course, a fraud. A previous message also informed us that Facebook needs our debit card number and $50 to complete the restoration of the account.
We ignored and deleted both messages. It is troubling that Facebook’s algorithm can readily detect and react to anything suspected of violating “woke” sensitivities, but cannot detect attempts at fraud carried out in Facebook’s name. Facebook has enslaved itself to woke culture and for the same reasons MSNBC and, to a slightly lesser extent, CNN and network news outlets have. Advertisers require keeping a level of viewership, and viewers require content they agree with.
At Facebook, advertising dollars reign supreme. Facebook’s most valuable demographic is young people, but that age group’s mass migration to Tik Tok and other venues is underway. In 2022, quarterly revenue dropped significantly because Facebook’s advertising empire depends on keeping that demographic online and satisfied. Anything deemed offensive or disagreeable to that demographic is edged out of Facebook’s daily discourse — the First Amendment and free speech be damned.
Two weeks ago in these pages, we posted “Tragedy at Uvalde, Texas: When God and Men Were Missing.” In that post, I cited the grim reality of a burgeoning mental health crisis among young people in our culture, an alarming problem that exists today at a level never before seen. Something has gone terribly wrong. Over the last two years, daily users of Facebook rose exponentially because schools were closed and young men and women were learning remotely.
A lot of extra time was spent on Facebook in those two years, but the mental health crisis we are seeing demonstrates that Facebook just isn’t enough. Real, meaningful, human contact is essential to the development of the young. A computer just doesn’t cut it. We may never break free of social media, but we must break free of its addictive qualities. Independence Day 2022 is upon us, and it’s a good time to start with a Facebook-free day.
In the future world envisioned by Star Trek, no one ever even mentions Facebook or any anticipation of the accumulation of “likes.” Maybe our future might see Facebook as ancient history. Once you come face to face with a Klingon, no one wants to be his Facebook friend anyway.
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Actor Wil Wheaton in “The Game,” a classic episode of Star Trek the Next Generation in which he had to be liberated from enslavement to a mind-altering computer game.
Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Next week at Beyond These Stone Walls, I will present a post about the stunning news that the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade.
Please visit our newest addition to our Voices from Beyond page and please Subscribe if you haven’t already. You may also like these other titles that celebrate our hard-won freedoms this Independence Day:
After Roe v. Wade, Hope for Life and a Nation’s Soul