Hi all. As I mentioned earlier, I was in Facebook jail for a month due to a meme I posted that their AI moderator thought violated Facebook’s TOS, when in fact it didn’t.
The restriction was supposed to end this morning. I wake up to discover that Facebook has extended it till February.
This is, as far as I can tell, not even an actual decision on Facebook’s part but an error. They’d given me another strike, then like literally two seconds later they told me they’d made a mistake and removed it… supposedly. Except apparently they forgot to remove it. They only say they did.
Facebook’s mistake is making it impossible for me to run my Charley Project page on there (they won’t let me add stuff or make changes to my page), which is a pretty big problem for me. I tried to add another account as an editor to the Charley Project page, so someone could still post stuff. But it won’t let me cause it won’t let me run the page. So as far as the followers of that page are concerned, I’ve vanished without a word. Some of them have started to contact me on their own to ask if I’m all right. Many of them don’t even realize the Charley Project is also a separate entity outside Facebook.
No, there’s nothing I can do about this. I can’t talk to customer service. Facebook, as far as I can tell, literally has no customer service employees. And it has only 15,000 human moderators for a company that serves over a billion people. Almost all moderation is done by AI technology and it makes a lot of mistakes, which is why I’m in Facebook jail in the first place.
This is actually starting to cut into my income as well since I think a lot of donors were Facebook followers. Oh, well.
I’m not in the best of moods.
The Charley Project Blog 
Good for you! Stopped using Facebook when they wouldn’t let me post an article from New England Journal of Medicine. Not my views theirs! I guess Facebook thinks grey know more than medical experts!
Except I haven’t voluntarily stopped using Facebook and I don’t plan to. This is causing a lot of problems for me.
I am also banned from Facebook. I never did figure out what I did wrong. I finally just gave up. Keep up the good work Meghan.
Email: LWasil@fb.com
She is an account manager and can expedite your issue to the appropriate team. Explain that you run a well known site dedicated to highlighting missing persons cases and that this is your primary source of income; emphasize that this error is creating financial difficulties and that you know she can assist you in resolving the issue, due to her role as account manager.
Cheers, always loved your page, have a happy new year.
Her name is Lauren Wasil.
Thank you so much. I don’t have a lot of hope but I have written to Ms. Wasil.
Meaghan,
Has the country been taken over from within, or are these first amendment problems ‘just’ only getting worst. I am 74, a very young seventy four. When I was 6-9 years old watching TV in the early 50’s, people jumped on live camera 3 times proclaiming, “The country has been taken over from within!” Possibly, because of what I saw then, I am able to see what is happening now. Don’t overlook the likelihood that the country has been taken over.
This isn’t a first amendment issue. The first amendment only means the government can’t punish you for your speech. It doesn’t restrict a private business—which is what Facebook is—from deciding to do what it wants regarding your speech.
Actually if the govt can force a baker to serve anyone in the public wether. they like it or not then any private business should have to do the same Bye
It’s a little more complicated than that, and way off-topic to this post.
Facebook isn’t violating my constitutional rights, it’s just not providing good customer service.
Hope you can some help from that FB contact. Fingers crossed.
Darn. Social media can be such a blessing & a curse, can’t it? Especially when all your trying to do is help people go through one of the most awful experiences of life, having a family member/friend go missing. Thanks for keeping us updated, I hope your luck turns around soon with facebook.
I hope you get it straightened out. It sometimes seems like people who are up to no good on facebook are left to their own devices, but people who aren’t doing anything wrong (like you) get in trouble, and it isn’t fair.
Oh, bugger, Meaghan, I’ve been checking and wondering why you were still MIA. It’s so frustrating when it seems there’s nothing you can do. I hope the contact that asprovided was helpful.
I joined Parler because it is open minded and doesn’t censor posts the way fb and the rest do. I am sick of fb and the way they kick people off if the post does not go along with their agenda. I was hoping after fb got pulled in by
Congress for censorship, that they would stop their nonsense…nope. I think they need to have their privilege via Section 230 erased!
When I tried to share information about child trafficking and child pornography being an issue, I was kicked off fb for spreading false information.
The same thing has happened with search engines. I have switched to DuckDuckGo so I can look up information without bias.
I hope you can get fb to allow your site to continue uncensored, but I am not that hopeful.
You’ve got the wrong idea about my problem I’m afraid. I’m not complaining about being censored, I’m complaining about Facebook’s moderation being terrible and their AI being glitchy and their customer service nonexistent.
I don’t think Facebook has any particular agenda besides to make money for itself. And a privately owned platform has a legal right to police what its users say.
The revocation of Section 230 is likely to lead a lot MORE censorship by Big Tech platforms, not less, since they can become legally responsible for what users say on their platforms. As it is, if I libel you on Facebook, you can sue me personally but not Facebook. If Facebook also becomes liable for what their users say, that opens them up to all kinds of lawsuits and they would become more likely to prohibit speech than allow it.
Can we try to approach the issue utilizing different social media? Such as, can we instigate a large (as large as the Charley Nation is capable of) Twitter agenda, based on highlighting the FB mistakes and how Twitter followers can help? That’s the best idea I can come up with outside of dealing with FB directly (which seems like a lost cause per your experience).
That is a good idea and one I’ll consider. I have read that people who have had their accounts depublished (that is, erased entirely) for no reason have sometimes found success by tweeting about it and tagging Facebook execs.
I’m waiting to hear back from the lady another commenter suggested I write to. I got an automated response saying she was on vacation. She would have returned to work yesterday but I suppose I should be patient and wait a bit before I write her again to nag her. I don’t want her to see my communications as harassment.
I’m definitely not setting up a Charley Project account on Parler. I join just to check out the platform and I was horrified. All kinds of unhinged vile people talking about literally murdering those whose beliefs don’t line up with their own. One guy I saw was going on about how he wanted to start killing cops AND their families just cause the cops were doing their jobs, enforcing the law and I guess he didn’t care for the laws they were enforcing.
I hope the FBI have eyes on Parler. I’m all for free and open discourse but these people sounded scary and nobody should be threatening physical violence on anybody else. I’m sure it’s mostly just talk, joking or maybe fantasy, showing off to sound more extreme than everyone else on the platform. But sometimes violent fantasies and violent rhetoric leads to violent action.
I have a page on Facebook. However, I have not visited it. I agree with the comments about their censorship. As Jack Nicholson, in a Few Good Men, said, they can’t handled the truth. So, they have their concepts of what the truth is.
I have not been on Facebook in years. I had problems with complete strangers wanting to be friends with me. I would wonder how, or why they selected me.
This isn’t really a censorship issue; Facebook isn’t discriminating against me. They basically treat EVERYONE equally terribly. This is a customer service issue.
I’ve made some great friends with complete strangers on Facebook, many of them in groups I happened to belong to or friends with people I was friends with. I even invited some of them to my wedding. (None of them were able to come cause Covid.) But on the other side of the coin, there are a lot of bot accounts on Facebook too.
People just don’t get it, do they?
Apparently not.
They surely don’t. Any chance to feel persecuted, they’ll jump on it, regardless if it’s relative or sensical. It’s almost as bad as the boys… they see one or two words and pay zero attention to context. Meaghan is way more patient than me.
Bots, not boys. Geez.
Some good news. A Lance David Ray, M/W. 53, was arrested in Bloomington, Indiana by Phoenix. Arizona police for two kudnappingsxabd sexual assault of two young men 14 and 17, and the homicide of an 18 year-old in 2000.
He was identified through DNA. Mr. Ray lived in Arizona from 1999 to 2003. He then moved to California and then to Misdouri. He arrested sometime in October 2020.
They believe their may be other victims.
It appears Mr. Lance Ray, lived in San Francisco in the early 1990’s. In 1993, he moved to Portland, Oregon. It appears he lived in Oregon, Washington, and California until 1999.
He then moves to Phoenix in 1999 where he lived until 2003. He then moved to back to California and lived there from 2003 until 2017.
He then moved to the St. Louus, Missouri area in 2017.