Monday, April 9, 2018

Legal Schnauzer post that asked if social-media giant supported police brutality seems to have prompted our quick release from troll-induced "Facebook Jail"


One of the photos, depicting the aftermath of police brutality,
 that caused Facebook to deem our blog URL
 "spam" and "unsafe."
After 10 days in "Facebook Jail," the URL for Legal Schnauzer has been deemed safe to return to the social-media world.

We received notice of the decision last Friday, less than 24 hours after we published a post titled "Facebook rewards trolls by putting a block on Legal Schnauzer URL, suggesting the company supports police who beat up women and break their bones."

Did that post prompt Facebook's decision to reverse its finding that our blog URL was "spam" and "unsafe"? We don't know, but the post raised questions that had to be unsettling to anyone at Facebook who might have seen it; for sure, the company reacted swiftly once the post went up. From the post of 4/5/18:

Does Facebook support police brutality? Based on our experience over the past week, the answer appears to be yes.

Last Monday, I published this post about the injuries my wife, Carol, sustained when deputies in Greene County, Missouri, brutalized her during our unlawful eviction in September 2015. The post features photos that show in grim detail the beginnings of severe bruising on her left arm -- plus a lump likely caused by pooling blood and a bone fragment pushing against the skin -- including the photo above. All of the photos were taken at the Cox North emergency room in Springfield, just moments before X-rays revealed a comminuted fracture (broken in two or more places) that would require trauma surgery for repair.

What happened the day after the post went up? When I tried to publish a Legal Schnauzer post on Facebook, I received a notice that my blog URL had been deemed "spam" and "unsafe." I notified Facebook at least three times that it was mistaken; the post clearly is not spam, and my blog is published from a secure URL, so it is not unsafe. A number of readers also have alerted Facebook that it is wrongfully blocking Legal Schnauzer's URL. This has been going on for nine days, as of today, and my blog URL still is blocked as being "unsafe."

What is going on? It appears that police (or pro-police) trolls have whined to Facebook about my post that reveals their handiwork, falsely claiming it is spam. Facebook's policy evidently is to take the word of any troll who wants to attack someone who poses a threat to them -- and then to take forever to correct the mistake, or maybe neglect to correct it at all. Another blogger sees the attack as being Alabama based, and he might well be correct -- or it could be a joint Missouri/Alabama operation. . . .

With this sort of ignorant policy in place, is it any wonder Facebook has lost at least $80 billion in market value from it's ongoing data scandal?

The block on our URL undoubtedly was the work of police-connected trolls. We suspect Facebook is not nearly as forward-thinking and progressive as it wants the world to believe. But still, the company probably did not like being depicted as a supporter of police brutality -- and if it conducted any research, it probably found that we were correct in asserting that the Schnauzer URL was blocked because of pro-police trolls -- so that might explain our quick entrance back into good graces, once our post ran on 4/5.

For those who follow me on Facebook, I'm going to be running URLs to the 10 days' worth of Legal Schnauzer posts that were wrongfully blocked.

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