How conservatives are exploiting flaws in Facebook software to censor liberals…

For quite some time, liberals have had a natural advantage over conservatives in cyberspace. Liberals are younger and more likely to adopt new technologies earlier. Conservatives are more likely to be cranky old poops sitting in their lounge chairs listening to their Glen Campbell eight-tracks (look it up, kids).

But after the Obama team used social media to launch a historical victory in 2008, conservatives began scrambling to figure out how to harness all these new tools. They haven’t done very well: their leaders and followers are by definition averse to new things, and cyberspace is a place for people who have good new ideas and can defend them in an open arena – concepts which are terrifying to conservatives.

But there is one area in which conservatives always excel: gutter political tactics. So now they have found a way to exploit weaknesses in the new social networking milieu.

A key weakness in Facebook, for example, is that although Team Zuckerberg is filthy rich and pulling in billions in profit each year, they can’t be bothered to provide quality customer service. Getting an actual human to address a problem you have with Facebook is essentially impossible: the vast majority of processes at Facebook – even customer service and troubleshooting – are automated. Performed by machines. Or else farmed out to dollar-a-day peasants in places like Pakistan and the Middle East, people who barely speak English.

So the conservatives set to work, trying to figure out how to game the system. And unsurprisingly they found many flaws. One key problem is that, instead of establishing a proper oversight process, the Facebook system takes the easy way out: they set their machines to look out for events that happen many times, rather than once. If someone posts something that irritates another person, who then complains, that could fall through the cracks. But if ten people all complain to the machines about the same post all at once, then the person who posted it is likely to be banned, by the machines. And if the victim of this attack wants to protest this, there is no one to complain to, except the machines, because he’s just one guy. The machines will tell you quite forthrightly that such bans cannot be appealed, because reviewing such an appeal would require a human.

The conservatives figured out that if they could set up teams of a dozen or so people, for the express purpose of “gang-reporting”, they could get their enemies thrown out of Facebook. They simply took the lynch-mob tactic they perfected a century ago and updated it for the 21^st century.

Recently this phenomenon was spotted in, of all places, a conservative-run site for survivors of domestic violence. This site ostensibly focuses on domestic violence, but the true goal is to pounce on the victims of violence at their moment of greatest vulnerability, and try to rope them into the evangelical movement. And their subordinate goal, believe it or not, is to visit other (better-run) domestic violence sites, trying to disrupt them by launching “gang-report” attacks. In other words they identify the managers of the other sites and send in a dozen people to report the managers, all at the same time, to try get the managers banned and wreck the other site. That drives victims of violence away from the site that was attacked, and one such targeted site eventually collapsed. In other words Facebook is rewarding the gang-attackers by punishing the victims.

Now another purveyor of this tactic apparently has emerged: a gigantic conservative site called Conservative Daily, with something like three million Likes. Their members have filed so many complaints against people they don’t like, that Facebook apparently has had to proactively “protect” Conservative Daily from all the people whom its members are complaining about – protecting the attackers. All a non-conservative needs to do is visit that site and question anything posted there, and no matter how politely they do it, the Facebook machines will either demand that the visitor reenter their phone number, on pain of being ejected from Facebook as a security violator, or simply toss them into the Ban Bin right away. And the purveyors of Conservative Daily apparently know that their incessant whining has afforded them this protection, because now they are flagrantly posting inflammatory posts attacking liberals and moderates, and openly daring them to visit the site and respond – so the “gang-report” posse can get them thrown out of Facebook. “We’re offended, ban him!”

And again, there is no recourse, because there is no human to complain to.

It is a virtual certainty that somewhere, right under the noses of Facebook, these guys have a little chat room or Secret Group, where they coordinate all this: “Hey, some guy just came and said Obama cut the deficit – here’s his name and the thread, go report him! Yee haw!”

There are other conservative sites that use the same tactic. Conservatives realize their ideas and philosophies are so fallacious and dishonest that they can’t possibly win a fair debate, so their only recourse is to work the refs. Which is particularly easy when the refs are badly managed machines and minimum-wage subcontinentals who haven’t a prayer of figuring out what is really “offensive” in the American political arena.

Anything to see to it that fewer moderate and liberal voices are heard, and that conservative hate, lies, attacks, evasions don’t get as much scrutiny as they would otherwise.

And Facebook is not just a passive participant in this. Outside sites which criticize these Facebook practices have been labeled “spam” by Facebook – Facebook doesn’t want you to hear anything critical of Facebook. So now, amazingly, they are even trying to censor content outside of Facebook.

**UPDATE** -- now nobody can post in Conservative Daily at all, without a security check. Wow! They have Facebook protecting them around the clock. So, Mark, where do the rest of us get customer service like that? Do they get mints on their pillows too?