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Finally figured out why my posts were getting flagged on Facebook
I spent 6 months writing careful, factual updates about a protest in my city, thinking I was being smart by not using any harsh words. Then a friend who used to work on content moderation told me the algorithm flags certain sentence structures, not just keywords. She showed me how my posts had the exact pattern of wording that triggers automated review. Has anyone else run into this weird grammar-based shadowbanning thing?
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lily36028d ago
oh man that reminds me of this time I was trying to post about a local food bank closing and I kept getting flagged too. i wrote something like "the city decided to shut down the only place people could get free food" and it got pulled for "misinformation" or some crap. turns out the word "shut down" combined with "city" and "people" was triggering some automated review system. i had to rephrase it as "the building stopped being used for giving away meals" and it went through fine. so yeah their filters are definitely looking at how you string words together not just the words themselves.
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angelac6328d ago
Hold up, did your friend ever find out if there's a list somewhere of these weird trigger phrases? Because I had a buddy who tried to post about a little free library getting vandalized in our neighborhood, and he wrote "someone broke the glass and took all the books from the community box." It got flagged as "harassment" or something. He had to change it to "the book sharing cabinet got damaged and the items inside are gone" before it would post. Made no sense at all, it was just the same info with different words.
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thomas29128d ago
Wait, did your friend ever get that thing where they tried to post about a local park being closed for construction and it got flagged as "spam"? My buddy had to change "closed for construction" to "not open right now due to work" before it went through. Crazy how these systems just mash words together without understanding what you're actually saying.
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