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My 68 year old dad explained why he shares banned memes on Facebook and it hit me different
Last Saturday my dad called me about a meme he got a 3 day ban over on Facebook, a joke about gas prices with a cartoon of a guy crying at a pump. He said something that stuck with me: "They never show you the rule, they just take the picture down and say you broke one." He has been on that site since 2009 and this was his fourth ban in two years, two of them for stuff I would not even blink at. I always figured he was just bad at reading terms of service, but then I started thinking about how none of us really know where the line is until we cross it. He lives in a small town in Ohio and honestly the meme was dumb, not hateful, just dumb. It made me wonder if the problem is the memes or the fact that nobody can see the rulebook. Has anyone else watched a family member get hit with bans for stuff that seemed random? What did you tell them?
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grace_taylor7d ago
I read a piece a while back about how all these platforms write their rules so vague on purpose, so they can yank anything and call it a violation without ever having to explain themselves. That is exactly what your dad ran into. The rules are like a fence with no posts, you only find out where it was after you already walked through it. My uncle got a week in Facebook jail over a joke about his own lawnmower, no clue what rule that broke. The real problem is not the dumb memes, it is that normal people are getting punished by a system that never tells them what they did wrong and gives them no way to fight it. Your dad is not bad at reading the rules, the rules are just hidden from everyone.
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