Member-only story
Farmer Given 3-Day Facebook Ban Over Literal Sheep
Facebook’s Astronomically Stupid Community Standards
It started with a fairly typical exchange for Facebook in 2020. Nicole Goetz, who runs a small farm in southern Michigan with her husband called Frontière Farm House posted some charming pictures of herself on the farm — one with a goat and several with a few sheep. A friend soothed by the cuteness commented she was “Struggling with the big sad and appreciate the goat pictures”. To clarify, Goetz's reply included “all except the all-white dude are sheep”. Somewhere deep in the heart of a poorly-written algorithm, Facebook’s most useless of bots instantly detected white dude are sheep — and Goetz was automatically given a three-day ban.
Facebook’s “Community Standards” are an utter failure on multiple levels. To the average user, it can be a confusing experience because many make the knee-jerk assumption that someone has reported them, when in fact, this “feature” (that is more of an intentional bug from a basic UX literacy perspective) is automatic. It’s the kind of batshit bureaucratic interaction with a large corporation so surreally absurd, it belongs in science fiction films — Brazil’s “Central Services” comes to mind. Facebook clearly came up with a list of phrases, and if you type one of those phrases regardless of context, you get the boot.
In Goetz’s case, the primitive simplicity of the filter demonstrates its failure to understand how language actually works — even on a very basic level. For instance, a naive person might assume that when Facebook came up with that particular phrase, someone would have anticipated discussions of literal farm animals — an assumption that Facebook is much smarter than it is.
There is also no process for correction as far as anyone can tell, so your account will come with a warning with increasingly harsh penalties if it happens again — even if Facebook is squarely at fault. It claims it has an internal “review team” which is clearly a sleight of hand term for “bot” since there was no way to correct it and nobody reached out to Goetz with an apology. A less lazy company…
