Facebook limiting "Australian Christians" site
Meta is interfering in the Western Australian state elections. They are limiting the Australian Christians website.
This is actually quite disgusting, undemocratic behaviour. My recommendation is, don’t use Facebook. They don’t deserve our custom, our information (which they siphon into their disgusting pool of exploitable knowledge), our patronage, our advertising views, they deserve nothing from us. I already stopped using Facebook a few years ago, when they stopped me from advertising on their platform, despite having no negative checkmarks against my site.
In this video the lovely and talented Maryka Groenewald (who is happily married actually, so don’t even think it, single men in WA) explains what’s happening:
https://www.facebook.com/AustralianChristians/videos/399597966388414
Apparently Australian Christians were wondering why their Facebook views diminished for no apparent reasons from a reach of 322,000 in 2022 to a reach of 41,700 in 2024.
They reached out to Meta and received the amazingly honest reply that, yes, their views were being limited, but that there was nothing the Meta employees could do about it, and that it must be their own fault. It was probably a form letter, sent by AI. But what this email actually shows is why it is probably extreme folly in legal terms to do everything by AI…
They recommended that Australian Christians look at their page status and see if they had violated Community Standards.
And in fact, Australian Christians had not violated any community standards: they had a completely clean record.
Indeed, their page was marked “Recommendable” and the algorithm even included the lie, “we’re helping you grow your audience”. Facebook should be careful about this sort of thing: considering that Facebook is a commercial company that relies on advertising, this little thingamajig probably offends Australian false advertising legislation.
So Australian Christians contacted Facebook and received this patronising response, which appears to be quite dishonest:
So after this debacle, Maryka Groenewald and her buddies decided to engage in a little experimentation with Meta AI.
They asked for the ranking of the Western Australian political parties from most to least bigoted and this is what they got:
You can’t just blame the computer program: all of these AI computer programs are written by people. And these blasted AIs are trained in certain ways with the disgusting prejudices and bigoted views of those who program them. It’s about time Facebook was reined in.
What we need to do in Australia is vote for the parties, like Australian Christians, Clive Palmer’s Australia One party, Pauline Hansen’s One Nation, who might at least have a chance of writing laws that limit this kind of bad behaviour and ideological bias, in what’s supposed to be a democracy, for God’s sake. Good grief.