KING ZUCK GOES QUITE MAD WITH POWER

Facebook's newest message, embedded in comment lines, is: Most relevant is selected, so some comments may have been filtered out.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO and founder,  is micro-censoring to a new and breathtaking degree. On Facebook, where most US social media people are, with a huge US election coming up, political activism is rising sharply as the people on both the Right and Left discuss issues and candidates. Folks are, earnestly and rich in fact, talking to each other. That alone would be news. 

In this crucial political year, Facebook is deciding not only who may use the world's biggest social media platform, and what we may post, and who may see our posts (they go out to an estimated 2-5% of our friends and followers), but what comments we may make on posts, and which of those comments is most relevant, all others being obliterated before even the poster sees them!  

As noted, Facebook's newest message, embedded in comment lines, is: Most relevant is selected, so some comments may have been filtered out.

What's left of our political conversations are apparently being filed away intact. I tried to delete something that I thought was repetitive and instantly got That comment may not be deleted....

More recently, a friend of mine posted and many seconded, "If I close this FB page completely for a few seconds, and attempt to return to the same page, I cannot. FB opens a completely different page with different comments, contents, et al."

Zuck is still in full control of Facebook; his board reportedly wants to fire him but he owns 60% of the stock. By all accounts he micromanages every detail, ordering bots and hirelings to make it so. So this micro-censorship is his personal doing. We may in effect use a pencil but not an eraser and, with his human and software appendages reading everything for him, he rips up whatever parts of our posts and comments to our friends that he doesn't like, while he chooses our friends.

Zuck has, as the Brits put it, "gone arse over tits mad".

Very dangerously so.

So why am I still there? To keep my ear to the ground in a political year, to tell Facebook friends what Zuck is doing and to radio out reports from inside as a new type of tyranny forms in the world....