A PSA about the Capacity to Offend

And the 50/50 odds that I may not offend enough

My Thursday plans were disrupted by an inadvertent discovery. I was briefly banned from posting, commenting or liking anything on Facebook. I can resume my role of providing free content there - as hundreds of millions can do - around midday Friday.

No formal explanation was required or issued. If I did not initiate another effort to communicate on that platform, I could be indicted, judged and punished without any awareness of the sentence or how it could impact my future use of Facebook.

Rumor has it that temporary banishments can lead to permanent banishment even if I never received any notice of any transgression. They own the platform but the notion that the public sphere it relies on is theirs to control as they see fit is presumptuous and transparently indefensible. Their business model is to gain free content from public users to build traffic so they can justify their ad sales.

I object to its poorly defined standards of permissible words and images and its unregulated practice of creating algorithms that automatically ban users because a certain word or word group was used. Algorithms are notoriously bad at recognizing the context of a sentence or sentence fragment.

Worse, denying the alleged transgressor user an automatic notice of the charge and punishment, or any appeal process, is dictatorial and is equally in violation of an important and very real community standard: the public sphere does not exist because a publicly owned social media company built a stage and invites the public sphere to use its lecterns to address a larger public from. In all likelihood, I agreed to some specific term of service that grants them a right to auto-censor every single word in my vocabulary.

But I reject the notion that it’s wholly theirs to own, control and administer unjustly , secretlywhile denying the common and universal right to an appeal of its auto-decisions. And my objections and rejections are not an appeal to defend me for my actions nor demand an end to this temporary ban.

It’s an appeal that we recognize the public commons where we can express an idea, critique one another, utilize a word or image to bolster or enhance a POV exists on multiple platforms. Facebook is not a private club but the largest public forum in this and many other countries with a reach second only to a presidential press conference.

When my own subsequent action triggered the only notice that I violated something and the only notice that I had been plunked into their sensory-deprivation jail, my first thought was that I’d committed two tansgressions on the same day. Only after the moderator of a private group timeline notified me what they’d auto-generated to him did I notice the dates of my offenses differed by nearly twelve weeks. The actual content shouldn’t matter. Both were devoid of slander or libel. One used a meme I found on another Facebook timeline that I made a satirical remark about to make fun of some individual or group in a legally permissible way.

My offense today was likely the use of a mild, commonly used cuss word. I think it was the word ‘Asshole’. But Facebook has left that unclear. Maybe it was the use of the word ‘fake’. How am I to avoid repeating the offense when I can’t be sure of what the offense was?

Here’s what the private humor group’s moderator was told:

My comment quoted from the post that expressed a weariness of FCAs which caused another user to get flagged. My comment did not incite violence nor advance any action against any individual or group. My comment only sought to provoke a laugh at the expense of an amorphous group that must now be considered a protected group that none identify as members of. I did not define or imply what ‘our valuables’ were.

In context, I typed something virtually meaningless and silly. Could anyone conclude I was implying that ‘we’ were actually storing anything in a Christian or a fake Christian or in a literal asshole either possessed? Or that we should utilize anyone or anything as an actual storage space? Get real.

I wasn’t piling on to the concept that ‘fake Christians’ exist nor who belonged to such a group. I was simply banished for saying something silly. Something that apparently made an algorithm blush or recoil from.

No social media platform has a legal or ethical obligation to protect anyone from silliness. Facebook’s content creators or content restricters claimed a private ‘community’ of amateur humorists had standards that I violated. Nobody expressed outrage because my comment never even appeared on the group timeline. Had it appeared I know nobody in the group that would find offense in it.

Creating an algorithm to limit or prevent hate speech can only be effective if the term ‘hate speech’ was clearly defined. In all previous legal definitions of hate speech, silly comments would not fit the definitions.

My objection is not about the ban directed at me but at the notion that anyone should be banned for good humor or bad attempts at humor.

Facebook invited the public in their stage door. It created private stages where the public audience had to be invited and subsequently chose to opt in. Over time, some audience members have decided to exit the group. Some audience members have been removed from the group by living moderators because their input was considered hateful by members of the audience.

The whole point of having the private group was to express humor about topical news from multiple sources: politics, business, arts, culture, etc. I violated no standard at all.

Facebook claims to own this public sphere because its architects and builders created its stages. I object and refute their mining claim, their ownership claim. How can a publicly traded company grab a huge chunk of the public square and kick out the public for no actual offense?

’Because they can’ is an infantile argument. Now I’ll find out if a permanent ban comes without warning or notice by posting my objection to their eminent domain seizure of OUR place, the public square. I’ll be posting this Friday, as soon as the one day ban ends.

Do you think Facebook is within its rights to treat me, you and any well meaning user like this? Do you think there is no online public sphere that we, the public owns? Not a group of shareholders and the software engineers they employ. Again, I was banned for hate speech. Merriam Webster defines it as “speech that is intended to insult, offend, or intimidate a person because of some trait (as race, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, or disability).

I intimidated nobody. I quoted “fake Christian assholes” from another person’s post but intended no insult nor to offend a single Christian nor all Christians. Silly humor can insult and offend, but where does Facebook gain the right to declare that was ‘intended’? As I said, my intent was to promote mirth with a nonsense statement, nothing more.

Is humor unacceptable in the public square if someone claims they were offended? Does an algorithm have more rights to decide this than all the content creators who generate traffic that creates Facebook’s profit stream?

I’m completely unaware who the original poster was referring to when they mentioned ‘fake Christian assholes’. If someone claims to be a Christian but is really pretending to be Christian, how does one define the poseur? Can the poseur then pretend to be offended without scrutiny of their intent?

If humor can so easily be scrubbed out of online public discourse, automatically, without any appeal option, what else can be scrubbed out? Censorship that begins like this has never led to a satiated appetite. The designers and creators of this plan have one clear intent: suppression of voices. Voices that intend to entertain.

That private group is a community and has clear standards. One of them is that we can’t quote someone to a timeline outside of that private group. The whole purpose of that standard is so we may speak freely without offending anyone and without causing a potential for someone offended to retaliate against the original author.

A racial slur or a slur against people of any faith would not be tolerated by the moderators. In a time when elected officials have regularly claimed that electing a Muslim or permitting Muslims to emigrate to the US will result in the imposition of sharia law, Facebook owners are claiming satirists and silliness posters and commenters intend to harm people who pretend.

I’m offended by someone who pretends to represent Blacks by wearing Blackface. That quickly brings public censure. Is it any less a pretense when someone pretends to represent Christians because no physically visible makeup is used?

In this instance, I wasn’t even arguing that fake Christians exist. Any offline humor stage grants license to satirize, critique or mock via the use of humor. That’s why I believe social media companies require greater regulation. Not to limit speech but to protect reasonable speech, entertaining speech and silly speech.

So Facebook and the billionaires it rode in on: ban me if you think you must. I just think it’s economically suicidal to erase humor and humorists from public discourse. It’s both sillier and more offensive than anything I’ve ever said in a public or private forum.

Note: after publishing this, one final proofread indicated I’d made 4 spelling errors and one typo where two words ran together that I’ve now edited out. The rest of my argument remains as written.