Facebook took down a 1,000,000+ follower page belonging to high-protein / low fat Crossfit guys and gals. It was critical of government health and diet advice, as it should be, since all government diet and fitness advice has to be made with an eye to how much it costs compared to the minimum and median wages in the country. Since there are a lot of poor people in the USA, the US government diet and health advice is dreadful.
The user page went back up pretty quickly, but not before the central Crossfit organisation read Facebook the riot act and closed all its pages.
The commenterati saw Facebook’s take-down of the Crossfit as censorship: how dare the sheeple criticise the government and offer diet advice that Big Sugar, Big Carb, Big Farming, and Good Vegans Everywhere don't like?
Here's a much better explanation. Facebook is in dire need of decent middle-managers who know how to do this stuff properly.
Facebook offshores the censorship function. Many of those people regard eating meat, especially the meat of the cow, as a Very Bad Thing. My guess is that Offshore Guy saw a page a) criticising received dietary advice, and b) advising much consumption of the meat of the cow, and took it down as obvious crankery and for saying Bad Things. A while later, when the sticky stuff hit the fan back home in the USA, Offshore Guy was soundly beaten around the head and told that this wasn’t Bad, and even though it did say people should eat much of the meat of the cow, that is not Bad In America.
If Facebook had any actual decent middle-managers working there, they would have set up some rules like:
For the Offshore Team:
a) Pages identified by the software as frauds, bots and other junk: immediate take down.
b) Beheading videos, massacre videos, (add other obvious horrors here): immediate take-down, pass on to Head Office
c) pages with 500 (or whatever number counts as ‘a small number of followers’) or less: ignore
d) pages with 1,000,000+ (or whatever number translates as 'a large number of followers'): refer to Head Office if it meets the criteria
e) pages belonging to anyone on this long list of big corporations, political organisations, Celebrities and Very Important People; or anyone followed by more than twenty people on that list: refer to Head Office
f) Other pages: follow the guidelines and act accordingly. Send summary of the day’s banning to Head Office in time for opening of business wherever Head Office is
For the (Onshore) Head Office team:
a) Anyone on this list of Heads of State, Central Bankers, Facebook Shareholders, EU or UN officials, Major Stock index board members, religious leaders, or Friends and Relatives of same: to be decided by Mark or Sheryl personally
b) Anyone else on the Offshore List of Important Poeple and Organisations, or anyone worth more than (enter Facebook-related financial criteria here) or with 5,000,000 or more followers (or whatever number makes sense): to be decided by the Facebook Deliberation Committee
c) Anyone followed by more than twenty people on the list in criteria a) or b): also to be decided by the FDC
d) Anyone else: use your best judgement
This works if you can get a large enough bunch of people who might loosely be described as well-informed grown-ups with good judgement and a sound understanding of the politics, culture and PR environment of the language-users and main audience for the page.
Good luck finding enough of those people. And even more luck keeping them for more than, oh, six months.
Facebook cock-ups.
No conspiracy. No grand plot to censor free speech.
Just business.
Done badly.
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