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At 7:55 a.m. Thursday morning, I posted a story I had written for The New York Post on both Facebook and Twitter. It was a reported piece on how people who voted for President Trump were feeling after both former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his lawyer Michael Cohen found themselves on the wrong side of the law.
Within two hours I started receiving a handful of notes from people who are friends on my personal Facebook page that their posting of my piece, entitled “Why Trump’s supporters won’t care about Cohen and Manafort,” had been removed.
Sometimes the removal was accompanied by a message from Facebook. “Spam” was the most common reason given, but a couple of people were told Facebook removed the post because “it did not follow our Community Standards.”
Immediately I went to my original post, which led to the link with this graph: “Right now the value of Trump to the Trump voter is he is all that stands between them and handing the keys to Washington back over to the people inside Washington. That’s it. He’s their only option. You’ve got to pick the insiders or him.”
The post was gone.
Why? Facebook had given me no reason why it would censor a story, and asking them for an explanation wasn’t easy.
First I politely published a public Tweet requesting some direction. No answer. I noticed that their Direct Message was open on Twitter so I asked in that format. No answer. Then I turned to their own page and asked through a series of confusing messaging options that appear to require a Ph.D. to access let alone find, still no answer.
Ninety minutes after removing it, the article reappeared as if nothing ever happened.
No one told me why it was taken down. No one told me why the piece suddenly reappeared with no explanation of what had happened.
Facebook offers no transparency for its methods or decisions.
The article was based on my conversations with Trump voters. It had no expletives, conspiracy theories, hate speech or sexual language. What sort of algorithm would find it, much less censor it?
Perhaps someone doesn’t like my stories and complained about it. But then, who is that person and why does Facebook give them that sort of power?
The third option is that someone working for Facebook actually saw it and made the decision to take it down. If that’s the case, what standards are they working from?
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