I posted my first morning piece — "Trump's dandy new $500 watch to the world's greatest master of incongruities, David Horowitz — on Facebook, a normal routine.
The searching, blind eye of Meta's AI then went to work, scrupulously safeguarding the innocent, the delicate, the vulnerable.
Within minutes it was on the case, rather, on my case. Alert, said a FB message. Your post violates "community standards" — the crime of weakening the site's efforts to make "people feel empowered."
The predicate adjective made its contaminate debut in high American society in 1983, says Webster, another plague visited upon us during the Reagan administration. I've never quite known what feeling empowered means, other than how Muhammad Ali always felt or maybe the state of a manic bipolar high.
I have, however, learned what violating community standards means. Other than failing to respect your dignity and safety, FB itemizes the transgression as the promotion of violent or criminal behavior, adult or child sexual exploitation, an absence of "integrity and authenticity," infringement of intellectual property and the posting of "content-related requests."
Now, AI is programmed to identify these online crimes, and in my public-enemy case I assume it spotted a content-related request: a $500 watch, which I was hawking. So, AI is really quite brilliant in such spotifications. But AI is also an idiot, in that it has no understanding whatsoever what a post's title means and what a post's content means.
Thus, it arbitrarily deleted the post. This happened once before. I submitted a "review" request, which FB said it would rule on and get back to me in a few days. It didn't.
That I don't much care about. I do care about some brainless hunk of metal obliterating my posts because it has an IQ somewhere lower than that of an amoeba's. And what I care about much more than that is a future in which this inhuman moron is making truly consequential decisions for us all.
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