Facebook is suppressing the local League of Women Voters with an election looming. Kansans, stay vigilant. • Kansas reflector

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When Facebook shut down Kansas Reflector on Facebook in April, we received a quick apology from Meta’s spokesperson and assurances that our content was not being targeted by the social media giant. It was all a mistake, he said.

Nearly six months later, that sounds like a lie. A whopper. A taradiddle.

Not because of Meta Kansas’s handling of Reflector: since our situation made national news, we’ve been able to post without any problems. However, hardly a week goes by without us receiving a message from a reader unable to share one of the stories or from an advocate whose online presence has been targeted in some way. The most recent and perhaps most egregious example was the suspension of the League of Women Voters of Lawrence-Douglas County Facebook page.

League chapter president Sonja Czarnecki contacted me and other local news outlets earlier this month after Facebook deleted the page for “violating community standards,” specifically highlighting “impersonation.” Like those of us at Kansas Reflector in April, Czarnecki had no idea what was going on or why.

The Lawrence Journal-World published a story about the suspension on September 17. Miraculously, the page was restored the next day.

“This experience was nerve-wracking,” Czarnecki told me late last week. “It was a stark reminder that Meta is a private company, not a democracy where people have the right to due process and knowledge of the charges if they are accused. I never received any further information about why our pages were suspended or why they were reinstated. I don’t know which of the three strategies I tried simultaneously was effective (contacting the press, leaving daily voicemail messages with a guy at Meta, involving the LVW-USA national staff).

An Ohio chapter of the group faced a similar shutdown in April, but we don’t know anything else about the Lawrence case. Social media plays a huge role in our lives, yet it can be difficult to keep track of exactly how platforms like Facebook interact with individual users. We’ll only know if the company issues a statement (vanishingly rare) or if someone contacts us. We simply can’t say anything else.

Czarnecki added: “I’m mostly afraid it will happen again.”

In his reporting after the takedown of Kansas Reflector, editor Sherman Smith found that the cause was likely unrefined artificial intelligence deployed by the company. The company’s AI is designed to remove inappropriate or spammy content, based on extensive programming. But as anyone who has worked with Chat GPT knows, such programs routinely hallucinate. Those who work at Meta probably can’t explain their AI’s choices. They simply clean up the aftermath.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks directly to victims and their family members during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on January 31, 2024 at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, DC
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, speaks directly to victims and their family members during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on January 31, 2024 at the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, DC. The committee heard testimony from the heads of the largest technology companies on the dangers of child sexual exploitation on social media. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

More worryingly, the platform’s indifference or outright hostility toward content from civil society groups and the news media appears to stem from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s disillusionment with politics. The AI ​​may actually represent a desire to shut down political discussion.

“According to more than a dozen friends, advisers and executives familiar with his thinking, his preference has been to wash his hands of everything,” the New York Times reported last week.

Zuckerberg apparently feels burned by the right’s reaction to his past activism and has expressed more libertarian ideas.

“That includes a hostility to regulations that restrict business, an embrace of free markets and globalism, and an openness to social justice reforms – but only if this does not go beyond what he sees as far-left progressivism,” wrote Theodore Schleifer of the Times. Mike Isaac.

Listen, I’m sorry Zuckerberg hurt his precious feelings.

People can be mean. Life can be challenging in ways we don’t expect. However, the rest of us don’t have $196 billion to fall back on when times get tough.

We also do not have a host of communications professionals ready to spread our message. What we have, for better or for worse, is a series of social media platforms, many of which are owned and operated by Meta’s CEO. We can look for other options and make other connections, but it will take time, energy and effort to redirect our audience. In the meantime, Zuckerberg faces no consequences for harming public debate through such removals.

As Mother Jones’ Tim Murphy noted, Zuckerberg did not actually reject politics in a sharp response to the Times piece. Someone with his reach and power couldn’t possibly do that.

“Zuckerberg’s efforts to discourage political activism among Meta employees (per piece) mirror his own efforts to discourage political content on the platforms he controls, such as Facebook and Instagram. Efforts to silence or discourage political expression are obviously a political act and betray an ominous worldview,” Murphy wrote. “At least in that sense, he and (fellow tech mogul Elon) Musk aren’t that different; Together they are building a ‘digital public square’ where everything can be found But reported, factual news. Zuckerberg has made it clear that he is frustrated by specific types of political speech – including criticism of him.”

In other words, he has become a conservative comfortable with authoritarianism.

So what do we do?

Here at Kansas Reflector, we have taken a number of proactive measures over the past five months. We have repeatedly encouraged readers to subscribe to our daily newsletter. We’ve expanded our town halls, where we meet readers in person and answer their questions. We now also post regularly on Bluesky, the decentralized Twitter alternative. At the same time, we have largely stopped posting to Instagram and Threads, two Meta-controlled platforms. Don’t worry, we’ll still be on Facebook for the foreseeable future.

Czarnecki is also referring female voters among Lawrence-Douglas County supporters to alternative platforms.

“We have our website and our monthly newsletter for members, and we try to accept every invitation we can to host events locally,” she said. “But like all organizations today, we still rely on social media to provide information to the public about voting and educational events such as our Civic Engagement 101 series (the next one on October 3) and candidate forums (the next one is on October 6) .”

Both the league and Kansas Reflector understand that we cannot trust a private company to prioritize the public interest. But concerned citizens need to know that too. Unless they set their eyes elsewhere, Meta won’t feel the pressure to change.

Clay Wirestone is Opinion Editor of Kansas Reflector. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policy or excluded from public debate. Find information here, including how to submit your own comments.

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