Marks Gallery of Facebook Infractions 8: Gronp edition

2021-07-19

tos , Facebook

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Post from the “Star Trek Shitposting Backup” group, explaining that the main group was disabled for deciding a “Dathon” post was ’encouraging violence and violent organizations’

The offending image that FB chose to block a ~98,000-member group for was this:

“Temba, his arms wide open” (a reference to “Darmok and Jalaad at Tanagra” from Star Trek the Next Generation). Juxtaposed into the meme is the band Creed playing “With Arms Wide Open”

So, nobody precisely knows what happened here. As far as I am aware, FB gave no official explanation and unbanned the group about 3 days later. The likeliest explanation I’ve heard is that it misinterpreted the image of the lead singer’s guitar as a firearm held in the hand of Creed-Dathon here.

I don’t envy Facebook the task of applying its TOS to images; that is, traditionally, the easiest way on Facebook to hide a TOS violation from auto-moderation (encode it in an image so text-based recognition misses it).

Part of me is suprised that a group with nearly 100,000 members doesn’t automatically trigger a manual pass before banning the entire group when the system detects a potentially violating image, but I don’t know the scale Facebook’s operating at; perhaps 100,000 is small-time from their point of view.