How Facebook successfully censors and suppresses

An experiment

Yesterday I performed an experiment on Facebook to see just how extreme the suppression of the kind of posts I used to make multiple times a day has become (to get a sense of the reach and engagement of my posts before I was specifically targeted by Facebook and the White House, please read my post The Virality of Truth).

Below, see the results of my experiment:

Note the timestamps above. These were posted within 5 minutes of each other. The one on the left was posted on my personal page, where I have ~2000 followers and I dropped the video in the comment section. The one on the right with the video embedded in the post was posted to my Beyond the Data page where I have ~3900 followers. Twice as many people should have seen the post on the right vs. that on the left. The one on the right is much more shareable as well. People are much more likely to read, watch or interact with a post if it’s all right in front of them. Having to click through a shared post to read the comments (which are also being messed with by Facebook randomly and arbitrarily hiding comments) in order to click a link is often too many steps to go through when someone is scrolling along.

Now, to get an idea of how hard this kind of suppression and censorship has hit my ability to reach people, let’s take a look at a typical post of mine (and pertinent to current events too) before my first Understanding Ohio COVID-19 Data page was shut down and these new rules were put in place.

Note that I was still doing all the ‘bad’ things here. I was not obscuring the word ‘vaccine’ in the images and I had an external link in the post itself (always important for appropriately citing one’s sources). Yet this was the engagement on the post:

Most likely tens of thousands of people saw this post. Thousands probably read it without reacting since it was all neatly in one place, all readable in their feed. Those who read it could share with their online networks or share offline with family and friends. By forcing me to make short little ‘teaser’ statements like my experiment at the beginning of this article and require readers to search my comments by default it severely limits the reach of my posts and the dangerous thoughts within.

“But Kathryn,” I hear many people saying, “just leave Facebook! There are so many other, better places!” Well, no. Not for my purposes. The advantage Facebook has over all other platforms is the ability for real discussion and community building for the purpose of building towards actual offline civic engagement. Twitter doesn’t allow for that (and the character limitations are brutal on me as you can tell from my example post). Nor does Substack. Yes, comments are enabled here, but it doesn’t generally lead to conversation between the readers as well as with me. Reading here also takes active action as well, while Facebook allows for more passive discovery. The Facebook-like platforms like Gab and MeWe end up being more like echo chambers than places where we can reach the necessary people in the middle.

In the end, the suppression works, unfortunately. This is how they do it. I’m not giving up (of course not!), but it sure makes it much more difficult.