a magician with colourful lights coming out of his hands

Facebook: Your Post Has Been Removed

From successful litter campaigns helping to Keep Orkney Clean to Weather Forecasts, Facebook has been either removing posts by The Orkney News or preventing our readers from sharing them. This is becoming a more frequent occurrence. Twice in the last 24 hours for example. There is nothing controversial about any of these posts – except…

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From successful litter campaigns helping to Keep Orkney Clean to Weather Forecasts, Facebook has been either removing posts by The Orkney News or preventing our readers from sharing them.

This is becoming a more frequent occurrence. Twice in the last 24 hours for example.

There is nothing controversial about any of these posts – except that the weather forecast might sometimes be unable to cope with the changeable nature of the climate in the Northern Isles.

Every time a post is either removed or prevented from being shared we appeal for a review – and hear no more about it. Basically nothing happens.

This strange mysterious use of AI instead of employing real people to check posts happens to The Orkney News only on Facebook. It does not happen on any of our other social media pages, and our website, with its local and international readership is unaffected.

Last night, 9th September, I watched an excellent programme where physicist Jens Dopke has used AI to help to read the burnt Pompeii Scrolls which he is in the process of scanning. The scrolls are undamaged by the process and because he has made his work Open Source it means others can help to decipher these incredible documents. An excellent use of AI and a long way off from what Facebook uses it for.

Meanwhile if you want to keep up with everything in The Orkney News, our website is free to subscribe to.

a magician with colourful lights coming out of his hands

Fiona Grahame

13 responses to “Facebook: Your Post Has Been Removed”

  1. kelticgirl Avatar
    kelticgirl

    There does seem to be active discrimination on FB against independence posts also. I post almost daily articles from Orkney News and, so far, they have been left alone. However, another daily post from Talking up Scotland is removed within the blink of an eye. Obviously long before anyone has had time to read the intro, let alone the article.

    Reply
    1. daniel laurie Avatar
      daniel laurie

      kelticgirl there is no doubt of the interference on facebook and other sites. X formerly twitter is a master of disinformation and I very recently have been removed from X (no great loss) but any attempt to ascertain why I am banned is ignored.Ah Well! Onwards and upwards.

      Reply
  2. berniebell1955 Avatar
    berniebell1955

    Great minds and all that – I’m just about to write on this subject in m’blog! Watch this space…..

    Reply
    1. daniel laurie Avatar
      daniel laurie

      I look forward to that Bernie.

      Reply
  3. berniebell1955 Avatar
    berniebell1955

    Hot off the press….. http://www.spanglefish.com/berniesblog/blog.asp?blogid=17006

    Reply
  4. S Davidson Avatar
    S Davidson

    Whilst this is concerning… and would point towards arbitrary actions (if one can say this when it is based on AI)…
    as someone who does not like the so-called social media (which has become rather unsocial), I tend to stay away as much as possible from FB and mostly only use it if it cannot be avoided.
    Isn’t there something wrong with our society if people rely on “news” from whichever social media site? What’s wrong with using the sites of the publishers/media directly, irrespectively whether this is The Orkney News, the BBC, orf.at, Rai news, the Süddeutsche… just to name a few?

    All this sharing on social media only embeddens the dismal practice of reading just headlines (on small screens… yes, I don’t like smartphones either, god am I old fashioned) and disseminating them widely without having read full articles.
    Any surprise that people are often ill-informed?

    It would make my day if the role social media plays in many peoples’ lives were reduced to what it was at the very beginning. Simply to stay in touch with friends and family, not yet politicised.

    Reply
    1. Tom Sharp Avatar
      Tom Sharp

      Just as well we have the Orkney News to share our profound deliberations on the state of the world instead of that awful Facebook stuff.

      Reply
  5. Mario Ricca Avatar
    Mario Ricca

    It’s really strange. Facebook never removed any post of mine, and some are political posts. I am with you, Orkney News is a wonderful page, and I am and Orkney fan – and Scotland as a whole is my favourite country, together with Italy. Hope you win that Facebook disagreement.

    Reply
  6. berniebell1955 Avatar
    berniebell1955

    I fought joining FB for years – only did so when it wouldn’t let me look at – for example The Orkney Wildlife FB page – which doesn’t have a website.

    And – yes, I noticed that too – the emphasis shifted from folk reading things on actual Websites, to FB – then to Twitter ( I know it’s called X now – such baloney – Sellafield was the same thing, when it changed its name to Windscale).
    According to the younger generation of my family, that is giving way to …something which I’ve forgotten the name of!

    I risk rambling on – but it’s true – folk don’t read things properly – that’s often clear from their responses. I think Fiona (G) has amazing patience with responses which are obviously caused by this lack of real attention to what’s there.

    I don’t have that patience, so my blog suits me. I have no idea who reads it, as I can’t work out Spanglefish’s statistics thing. I decided not to bother about that, as I write it because I like to. I do like to get interaction – real interaction, with some real thought behind it.

    As I often say – I make FB work for me, I don’t let it work me or give me ideas. I get those from life. I very much enjoy the sociable aspect of being on FB – I’ve had a couple of rows – but – that’s people, that’s life!

    Reply
    1. berniebell1955 Avatar
      berniebell1955

      Ooops – wrong way round – Windscale became Sellafield. More haste, less speed!

      Reply
      1. theorkneynews Avatar
        theorkneynews

        Calder Hall

  7. cathkilgour Avatar
    cathkilgour

    The administration of FB is inscrutable to me. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. 🙁

    Reply
  8. Joy Hamilton Avatar
    Joy Hamilton

    At the risk of sounding like a member of the tin-foil hat brigade: TON does run stories about the regular protests against genocide in Gaza; US policy favours Israel; Facebook is American-owned. Ergo: its algorithms may automatically reject some, if not all TON stories (it doesn’t have to make sense to people, or have a one-to-one correspondence to individual articles). Or something…

    Reply

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