Zuckerbots Are Running Amok

Or, why Facebook makes me think of Kafka's "The Trial"

If you’re at all interested in the legal side of current events, like the several cases pending against a certain former president, you know who Joyce Vance is, right? Capping a distinguished career in the Justice Department, she was appointed by President Obama as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. These days, as well as being a law school professor, she co-anchors the Cafe Insider podcast with Preet Bharara¹; co-hosts the #SistersInLaw podcast with Jill Wine-Banks, Barb McQuade, and Kimberly Atkins Stohr; and is a legal analyst for MSNBC and NBC.

You may even be, like me, a paid subscriber and regular reader of her Civil Discourse, an indispensable Substack in which she explains legal issues in the news, demystifies legal jargon, provides screenshots of key court documents, and — wait for it — occasionally shares photos and stories about her remarkable menagerie of hens, a cat, and a dog who get along remarkably well at their home in Birmingham, Alabama.²

I lay all this out not because Joyce needs the PR but to emphasize that her work is exemplary and should be above suspicion. However, many of us who shared yesterday’s Civil Discourse column on our Facebook profiles had it instantly taken down as spammish and otherwise unfit for sharing. WTF? we wondered. As of this writing, no one knows why FB — specifically its algorithms — took offense. Algorithms can’t read, and the post didn’t include any obvious triggers. Here’s what the heading and opening section looked like:

Taking a hint from another Joyce fan, I posted this to my Facebook feed last night, using one of FB’s canned backgrounds:

Then I shared the Civil Discourse link in the first comment. It’s been up ever since. Evident moral of story: The algorithm bots “read” posts but apparently they don’t pay attention to comments.

Several Civil Discourse readers have complained to Facebook. I haven’t, mainly because my previous attempts to pry justice out of Facebook have been wastes of time. Once I was dinged for using the word “dyke” in a post. I was referring to myself and some friends, but FB has decided that “dyke” is hate speech no matter how you use it. One FB friend got dinged for using the word “chink” to refer to a crack in a wall; FB thinks that’s hate speech too. Context means nothing to the algorithms.

Appealing to the “Oversight Board,” I think it’s called, gets you nowhere. For all I know, the overseers may be algorithms as well.

None of us can figure out why the Zuckerbots took exception to this particular Civil Discourse post. My hunch is that it has something to do with the fact that the Truth Social image is so close to the top, and Trump’s name might have something to do with it. Can the algorithms “read” the text in the image, as opposed to the text in the post itself? I’m not sure.

I expect that eventually we will find out what Facebook was “thinking,” since Joyce Vance is not without clout. When we do, I will add the explanation to this post.

Meanwhile, I’m brooding about how hard it is to get questions answered by many of the companies we deal with. We do get to interact with chatbots that can provide canned answers to five or six commonly asked, very basic questions. For anything more complicated you get referred, if you’re lucky, to a customer service rep of some sort. Before you reach this person you must often hold the line for at least 20 or 30 minutes while you are subjected to tinny, soporific, semi-classical music punctuated by tinny, soporific assurances that “Your call is important to us. Please hold the line and the next available operator will assist you.”

Can you imagine the Zuckerbots being accessible by phone? I can’t either.

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NOTES

1. Former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and, among other things, the author of Doing Justice, a very good, very readable book best described by its subtitle: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law (Knopf, 2019).

2. Yes, that Birmingham, Alabama. I grew up in Massachusetts associating Alabama with George Wallace, Bull Connor, and the September 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in which four young Black girls were killed, so I’m particularly grateful to the likes of Joyce Vance and Doug Jones for reminding me that there’s more to Alabama than that.