COMING OUT IN APRIL, 2023:
MY NEAR BRUSH WITH THE FACEBOOK BOT POLICE. OR MAYBE NOT?
Or maybe I wasn't a hairsbreadth away from Facebook Jail. Maybe what I posted wasn't in its context offensive to the Facebook community standard after all. Or maybe it was offensive and the bots, if they are insidiously efficient, will find what I posted (and soon afterwards deleted) floating somewhere around the vastness of the internet, where stuff can be created but not destroyed, and get me yet.
In truth, I don't actually know what my standing in the Facebookverse is at this moment. If anybody knows exactly what it is that one gets Facebook jailed for, I am looking for enlightenment.
Anyway, here's my tale:
A few days ago I posted on Facebook my previous blog, which was about a WWII spy novel I'd recently read, "Crosswind" by Karen K. Brees.
I came up with the idea of photoshopping a swastika onto a photo of a garden and using it as the cover picture for my blog post. Here's what I came up with:
About an hour after I'd posted the blog with the Nazi garden picture, one of my daughters called me.
"You might want to take down that swastika picture from Facebook," she said. "If the bots catch it you could end up in Facebook Jail."
"Facebook Jail?" said I. "It's not like I'm promoting white nationalism! Don't the bots know from context?"
My daughter replied that she didn't know if the bots knew from context. If they did I might be all right. But if they didn't I might be Facebook toast. She said that she wouldn't bet on the bots getting context. Rather she imagined their bot-radar making a beeline for that swastika. And me.
Still, I wonder if I'd left that swastika garden picture up, would I soon have gotten the Facebook hook? Or might the Facebook bots be more perspicacious than we understand?
Which is also a scary thought.