Facebook "Hate speech" update: just to follow up on that FB post that was zapped for alleged "hate speech" (and I'm sure everyone's dying to know), the appeal was successful and the deleted post has been restored. The message said "sorry we got it wrong." Which is nice, because, trivial as it undoubtedly is in this case, they did get it wrong and they should be sorry. "Hate speech" is an alarming thing to be accused of, even by a machine, even when you don't accept the premises of the designation, which I don't. What's not so nice: they still don't reveal what it was that tripped the "hate speech" wire, and there's no way to ask. This would be useful to know for future posts that you might not want to be quarantined for 24 hours during an appeal (in those cases when the option is offered, as it isn't always.) Again, the user is left with nothing but guesswork. And this is what I was getting at in my last essay on the matter (in last week's Weakly Reader): people who write things for public consumption have no reliable guidelines on how to self-censor in such a way as to avoid the increasingly numerous and restrictive tripwires for censorship. This leads to the development of a kind of folklore, a culture of what I called "kludging euphemisms." As the layers of speculation accumulate, discourse becomes ever more confusing to do and to interpret. My question is, why can't they just tell you what went wrong, from either direction? It would be a big help, especially for those who genuinely need the guidance because they really did write hate speechy stuff. But also, just as much, for people like me in this case, whose posts accidentally, inadvertently get swept up in the nets of the Banning Machine, like dolphins among the tuna. Maybe we want to avoid these waters and spare ourselves the nets next time. I *think* what probably tripped the wire was the quoted sentence about humanity's fallen state and our preference for attacking others rather than looki...