I recently posted at Facebook as Ung Vetenskapssport (an NGO that organize training camps in science sports for high school students.) about IMO - the International Mathematics Olympiad. Sweden got a gold medal through Hugo Eberhard, which is fantastic news! Big Congrats!

The post got lots of reactions and a few congratulation comments. I then let Hugo tag the other 5 members in the Swedish team, which were present in an image in the post. However when 5 people were tagged the post got flagged as SPAM.

My current guess at why it got flagged is the behaviour of tagging quite a few persons in a picture, by someone that just received admin status on the page (Hugo). I have submitted a request for review, but it’s still pending, 2 days later. It’s quite absurd that they have detected some account behaviour that “seems like SPAM”, but I don’t have the right to say that their classification of the behaviour is wrong. So now my hands are bound on Facebook, I just have to wait for the review that probably will take a week or something, because if I repost the post, then I actually am spamming. Facebook is encouraging me to spam! :O

Other takedowns.

During the EU elections in May, one election video from the party Liberalerna with two men kissing, and one from Kristdemokraterna with a woman carrying a hunting gun were blocked from Facebook due to not following their guidelines.

Also in the Pirate Party we experienced problems getting our posts to be shown to our 71K followers. We got two posts linking to our web page approved, but all images with our tag lines were blocked. Images like the one to the right.

Note that you have to pay Facebook to be able to appear in your followers feeds, if you have many followers. This comic pretty much displays the history of Facebook.

There are also software problems with Facebook.

• Notifications. The notifications are so broken. They are not static, they reappear, they do not get marked as read properly. Also it’s not clear at all to me what becomes a notification and what does not. It seem to depend upon how many other notifications I have gotten in the last 24 hours.
• Search. Search is really really bad. It’s impossible to find an old post that someone wrote, if you only remember part of the content, but not who wrote it.
• Feed. If you have a post on the top of the feed, and you refresh, that post is basically gone. It has happened so many times that posts that I am interested in disappears. I’d like to be able to see all the posts that have been shown in my feed.

The Problem with Facebook (and the solution).

The problem with Facebook is that it uses a very strong lock in effect. No one is allowed to crawl Facebook, which means that everyone is locked into Facebooks viewer of the feed, their search and their notification system. It does not work properly to set up your own filters and actually be in control of what is displayed in your feed. Instead of improving your control of your feed and opening up the platform Facebook are very aggressively blocking content. Also this is the way a lot of policy makers want to proceed to battle fake news (also terrorist propaganda and copyright infringement). However this is the wrong way.

Fake news is mostly a problem for older people who blindly trusts the written word. It is made worse when Facebook constantly provides you with a feed, with information that is mostly true. Fake news is not going away by forcing Facebook to block content. Instead we need tools to guide us. We already have a lot of tools, like checking the source and giving the information credibility based on the source. You can also research the information yourself. But one tool I think would be very useful is to be more in control of one’s feed.

I don’t think we can change Facebook to open up and give us once again access to an RSS-feed for every page and person. Instead I think we have to hope for new communication tools that are more open, and gives back the control to the user. Like in the old days of RSS, but with more interactions. This technology already exists, it’s mostly a big leap to start using something other than Facebook, where few if any of your friends are. Proceeds to post a link to this post on Facebook…