You may not have noticed it, but in the right hand column you can see a link to the Facebook page I set up for my blog. It is this:

I did that back in 2018 when they stopped allowing us to share posts with our friends, but it does have a small advantage in that it is public, opening up a potentially larger audience. I have done very little with it other than using it as a vehicle for my posts, and the grand total of 89 page followers rather reflects that! It still gets regular links to the blog each week, so I haven’t really thought about removing it. Until now.

Last Thursday I opened FB to find this notification:

I’m assuming that it was an AI bot that took this decision, as any human with half a brain might have understood that bloggers like to attract new readers and every post is an opportunity to do that. It’s hardly conning people, is it, despite what their bot thinks.

I’ve clicked on a few of the links to find out more but, as you would expect from a big tech site, these are about as informative as a Donald Trump speech, though admittedly without the rambling, lies and incoherence. They allow you to query the decision so of course I did. Their ‘what happens next’ screen says:

Yeah, right. As it is now seven days I guess I’m in the ‘it can take longer’ category. This year, next year….

They also give you the ability to check your page’s status, so I did:

Do bots have hands? If so it appears that their right and left hands don’t know what the other is doing: they have just removed one of my posts but they tell me my page is in excellent health, so there is clearly something weird going on (not intended as another Trump reference, but maybe the bots also have tiny hands to go with their tiny brains).

In itself, this little episode isn’t really a big deal, but it isn’t the only one. A good blogging friend – Jill of Filosofa’s Word – posted on Sunday that the same thing had happened to her twice, and several others commented that they too had suffered the same fate. You can read her post here if you’d like to see what she said: being Jill, she went into attack mode rather more quickly than I have done! She posts several times a day, including a daily music piece, and the two that were removed were one of her regular offerings and a music one. In my case the post that FB objected to was one of those rare occasions when I wasn’t playing music: TBR Or ISRM? from last Thursday. Maybe they are trying to tell me something, that perhaps I should stick to music. It will be interesting to see if they remove this one too! And if they do, will they then ban my page as a repeat ‘offender?’

Try as I might I can’t see anything in that which could give the clowns at FB reason to accuse me of trying ‘to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way.’ FFS, it was just a simple blog post! Like all bloggers, I appreciate people reading, liking, occasionally even sharing my posts, but how can that be determined to be ‘misleading?’ It’s not as though I am claiming to have prevented WW3 when I’m actually trying to start it, is it? (Sorry, him again!). So is there something more sinister going on? Since Musk bought Twitter he has rebranded it as X, opened it up to unrestrained hatred and conspiracy theories, and is using it to indoctrinate the many morons who follow him into voting for his preferred candidate in the US election (guess who?). Is he trying to encourage Mark Zuckerberg to join Facebook with X in an Axis Of Evil? I’ve always thought that Musk was evil, but I didn’t think that of Zuckerberg. Until now, when doubts are beginning to form.

The big social media businesses are growing ever more powerful and influential, seemingly without any regulation. Do governments know what to do with them? Recently, Brazil banned X, which was a bit of a case of pot, kettle, black, but nowhere else really seems to have a handle on them. Given the proven influence of Russian efforts to mislead people on X, in particular, I would have thought that western governments might be seen to be taking action. Musk no doubt welcomes such interference, but the rest of us shouldn’t.

Am I blowing this up out of all proportion? It was just one little blog post from an insignificant corner of the web, wasn’t it? But I fear that in its own small way this may be symptomatic of something much bigger. That US election is on 5 November (an ironic date for a Brit!) and whichever way it goes there is likely to be a huge fallout to be fought on social media and, I fear, in reality, particularly if one side loses. This week, my humble blog post, next week…?

Do you have a Facebook page for your blog? If so, has this also happened to you? Do tell – I’d be interested to see how widespread this might be.

UPDATE: Facebook removed this post, 10 minutes after it went up. I’ve requested a review. Watch this space!