FACEBOOK attacks Vox Political – knocks us offline for a day
Facebook: dis-connecting people.
That’s right; Facebook managed to knock Vox Political offline for a day.
The first This Writer knew about it was on Friday evening (March 8), when I received an alert that the site was down. When I tried to check what was going on, I couldn’t get onto it at all – so I sent a note to my web host.
On Saturday morning I received a notice from Facebook, saying I had been banned from posting to pages and groups for a day because I had posted “nudity and/or sexual content”(!)
You may recall that I had published a story with an image of somebody’s backside with Rishi Sunak’s and Keir Starmer’s faces on each cheek. It was a reference to an ‘X’ post I’d made about them being two cheeks of the same posterior, blowing gas at each other.
The headline was “Is Vox Political having an effect on politics from the bottom up?”
Please visit that article to see the image. I don’t dare publish it here in case Facebook picks it up and uses it as the representative image of this piece, and I get another day’s ban!
Finally, today I had a message from my web host, saying the site ran out of memory – the cause being Facebook‘s crawler hitting hundreds of posts at once.
Why would Facebook want to do this?
I don’t know.
Was it because the article attacked both main political parties in the UK with ridicule – satire? Was it because the easiest and most effective way to make someone unelectable is to laugh at them?
Was it an attempt to silence an influential website before it really upsets the applecart?
Or was it just an accident?
As I say, I don’t know. But I do know how I’m going to respond.
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I tried to post this to FB, saying there’s planty offensive stuff on it without censoring nudity, but I’m not sure it worked.
That says a lot!
Not sure if it’s relevant but this site was offline all day, something to do with the data server came up,
Mike it’s FB they are the trouble and governments MPs give offence at someones post bang you banned it
I have been blocked by Facebook from sharing anything on Israel or Palestine for over a week. PLUS having spent several stints in Facebook jail from a day, and up to three months. The usual is six days, plust selective blocked sharing !!
I asked on Mastodon if anyone knew why I was getting this: ‘Error establishing a database connection’
but had no replies. Good to see you were back up and running this morning.
Facebook is a right pain these days. If they tell you that you’ve posted something that is against their rules, they never tell you specifically what that thing was, so I never know quite what they are objecting to. I never post anything remotely pornographic, so the worst thing it could be is something political that someone else disagreed with. The upshot of that is that I’ve been banned from posting anything at all without understanding what it is that I’ve done wrong, and it also means they can rewrite the rules as often as they like. That does seem quite unreasonable to me.
There was something wrong with your website for the last two days, Mike.
I kept getting ‘Error trying to reach database’ message. Dunno if it’s anything to do with Facebook as I’m not on it and not technically savvy anyways.
It was a result of what FB did, apparently.
Who gave zuckburger the power to switch you off from the internet?
From farcebook, maybe….but I’ll have nothing to do with that pile o’ sh…