Facebook foofaraw: Zuck's Meta mammoth warned me about posting nudity, removed my South Park Trump episode Substack link, and then suspended me outright for a "cybersecurity violation."

I don't think all that many readers will be interested in this story. I am really writing it to vent.

This is a Substack abto me, not once but twice on two consecutive days. It is also about one of Trump’s pals. This pal is one of those buddies who didn’t molest underage girls, Mark Zuckerberg, the second richest man the the world after Elon Musk.

Zuckerberg owns a large enough stake in Meta, which owns Facebook, to personally control it.

I am also sharing this story because, well, because I can:

Here’s Musk’s proving what kind of sad excuse for a human being he is: “Elon Musk Amplifies Bizarre Claim That 'Women Are Built To Be Traded'“ This is Mark Zuckerberg on women: “Mark Zuckerberg says companies need more 'masculine energy.' What does that even mean?”

Lord, save us from the oligarchs who think money equals manhood, and who are obsessed with proving they are the biggest, baddest Megasaurus of the manosphere.

Here’s the story about what Facebook did to me, but it is also a notice for anyone who likes to read my Substack by going to my Facebook page and clicking the links I post there. It is also for anyone else who I use Facebook to follow. Unless they reinstate me anyone who looks for me there won’t be albe to go to my Facebook page.

I may be saying goodbye to Facebook forever. I’ve been using them to post links to my Substack stories and to read and post on a few other Facebook pages, including Sabrina Haake’s and one on Trump being mentally ill. I also follow real life friends, some who I haven’t seen in decades, as they post about their lives/

Here’s what happened after I posted a link to Wednesday’s Substack about, among other things, the South Park episode about Trump. I posted a link on my Facebook post to this story:

Instantly I got this message:

Yesterday I went to a website about Trump being mentally ill to let them know about the Substack I’d just posted. Because Facebook lets me post a link to anything I write only once a day, I posted a link to BlueSky which they could go to and see this:

I instantly got this email:

Perhaps they consider my link to BlueSky a violation of their rules against promoting another business:

Here’s Meta’s cybersecurity page. I can’t see how anything I posted there violates their standards and rules in the slightest way. All I can think of is that they flagged a link to a competing social media site.

Obviously, my own free Substack should not be considered a business. However, BlueSky can be considered a Facebook competitor even though it is more a competitor of X which is owned by Elon Musk. Consider this from last year:

I assumed that they had an algorithm which flags any link to BlueSky. I don’t know if the same applies to links to X. This is just an assumption/

So I got the double whammy from the Meta maestro, Mark, who wants to make sure everyone marches to his Meta music, and his MAGA music when it comes to The Washington Post. It is probably something composed by Wagner. Sorry schmucky Zucky, I don’t dance to an oligarch’s orchestrations.

I finally relented after thinking I’d just give up on Facebook and did submit an appeal, so I may have to follow up with a mea culpa. I’ll let you know what happens.

Advisory:

If anyone is tempted to post a link to this Substack on their own Facebook page they risk losing their account. Consider the following from this entry on Wikipedia (my emphasis added):

Censorship of criticism of Facebook

Newspapers regularly report stories of users who claim they've been censored on Facebook for being critical of Facebook itself, with their posts removed or made less visible. Examples include Elizabeth Warren in 2019^[52] and Rotem Shtarkman in 2016.^[53]

In the context of media reports^[54] and lawsuits^[55] from people formerly working on Facebook content moderation, a former Facebook moderator (Chris Gray) has claimed that specific rules existed to monitor and sometimes target posts about Facebook which are anti-Facebook or criticize Facebook for some action, for instance by matching the keywords "Facebook" or "DeleteFacebook".^[56]

Addendum: I was able to get on Facebook using my partner’s laptop and post a notice on Sabrina Haake’s Facebook page (here) alerting her and her cadre of regular readers and commenters there as to what happened to me. I also was able to look myself up on Facebook to see if I was listed. There are more than 100 people named Hal Brown. I didn’t count, though I scanned them all to see if I was listed. I wasn’t. However there is someone named Hal Brown who, like me, is listed as living in Portland. Perhaps by chance he was the first on the list, although it is possible FB “knew” I was using a laptop in Portland so he was listed on top of the search. He’s only posted a few times and not since 2017.

I didn’t need to do this extensive search since it turned out that if I searched for Hal Brown and Portland I’d have found all FB pages for people who lived in Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine. https://www.facebook.com/search/people/?q=Hal%20Brown%20Portland

Enough of this Facebook foofaraw….

On another subject:

There was an article I found interesting which was published in The Conversation (and RawStory): “Roman Empire and the fall of Nero offer possible lessons for Trump about the cost of self-isolation.”

Trump may come to be known years from now as the president who built a giant gold plated ballroom attached to The White House and managed to get his face on Mt. Rushmore while his country burned.

Nero’s reign ended four years after the fire with armies bearing down on the city, he committed suicide. Rome tumbled into civil war.

Freudenburg concludes his article with the following:

Self-worship in the Trump era.

Trump’s critics have long noted the president’s propensity to focus on himself and his own greatness and power, rather than the needs of citizens.

As far away as the Roman Empire might seem, Nero’s rise and fall offers a lesson in what can happen when honest criticism of a political leader is sidelined in favor of idolatry.

Instead of honest solutions to real problems, what Romans got was a colossal statue that portrayed their leader as a god on Earth.

out what Facebook did