The Time I was Censored on Facebook for Posting a Flasher (Wrasse)
I mostly use social media to share my underwater photography and videography, and on Facebook, where I can set the privacy, I once in a while share moderately personal things like family trips to the beach. Occasionally I post something that my friends might find funny or interesting which isn’t ocean-related. So, my “content” is all harmless, and corporate censorship should not affect me? Wrong!
A while ago Facebook took down this picture of mine which I had shot in Malapascua in the Philippines:
Why???
This fish is a male flasher wrasse. To show the extent of its territory, it flashes its fins for the other flasher wrasses to see. It’s a somewhat rare and very pretty fish.
A “flasher” is also a sick dude who exposes himself in public. In a completely different context of course. But some algorithm or overworked “moderator” at Facebook didn’t realize the context and took the image down as “sexually explicit”. Hahah.
The recent purchase of Twitter by the South African entrepreneur Elon Musk has caused an online panic by people who like censorship (“moderation” “social media ecosystem curation”). I am not one of them.
The example above is funny, and it didn’t cause me any harm, of course. After submitting a protest, Facebook put the image back online. But it still illustrates a point. If you are pro-censorship, who do you think will do the censoring? The unbiased wise men and women? They don’t exist, and even if they did, they would not want to be “content moderators” at social media companies, and even if they wanted to, they would not be able to handle millions of cases per day. As a result, the censoring is done by algorithms or by overworked, underpaid 20-year-olds who take down flasher wrasses for being a threat to the feeble minds of sexually immature internet users. Not only will censorship always be biased, it will often be arbitrary and stupid.
And:
Also: a recent study found that the often vilified “YouTube algorithm” doesn’t turn aimless young men into right-wing extremists. Rather, folks who watch weird extreme-right videos get more of those recommended. Other people don’t, and don’t watch them much in the rare cases when they get them recommended. Just like I get more rock music and nature videos recommended, because that’s what I already like. The study takes the wind out of the sail of the argument that the evil algorithm is a mass producer of extremists – something which was a bizarre assumption to begin with, but now there is a systematic study to falsify it.
Hence: Censorship is not only immoral but also brainless, and not needed. Don’t do it.
