My Violations

Introduction

This week I violated rules on both Facebook and Pixabay and it showed me examples of how to deal with violations and how to not deal with violations.

This is a piece of my Facebook bans in 2019 and nothing much has changed since then:

The music is "In The Jailhouse Now" from the Coen Brothers film "Oh, Brother Where Art Thou".

The film is set in rural Mississippi in 1937, and it follows three escaped convicts searching for hidden treasure while a sheriff relentlessly pursues them. Its story is a modern satire which, while incorporating social features of the American South, is loosely based on Homer's epic Greek poem "The Odyssey"

So, The Violations

So first was Facebook, I got this, with no explanation except that I had violated community guidelines and I could request reconsideration, but just got a message back saying it had been removed.

This is a similar Seven Days In blog post to ones that I have been sharing for years. I usually included a meta redirect after ninety seconds to a Vocal story to give the reader a little more to read. I think they will have read the story after thirty seconds, as most these days are about where I am up to in reading my current book, in this case, "Copendium" by Julian Cope.

Two things slightly change for this.

The meta redirect was at the start of the story and then it directed to Amazon's Van Halen page.

I moved the meta redirected, reposted and got this

So they had decided I was spamming people. If the meta redirect was immediate I could understand, and it is to somewhere relevant to the story.

So it was the Amazon link that was the problem.

If you want to check it out the story is here:

Click it wait ninety seconds and web magic will take you to Amazon's Van Halen page though most of the stories will take you back to Vocal pages.

In the past Vocal were like that when they rejected stories, they would seldom say why a story was rejected and you were just expected to guess what the problem was, and when stories took two or three days to be evaluated, this was a problem.

These stays stories are published almost instantly so this seldom occurs.

Now this is how to properly deal with a violation.

I create AI images on Nightcafe, you can read about them here:

Then I shared them on Pixabay so that people can use them for a credit or a tip.

The Van Gogh image was removed for a potential copyright violation. I don't agree with them but it is clear why I can't share my image on the site. The two Bowie images below were removed for the same reason.

So if people want to use these images they can. They don't infringe copyright, but their AI checking implies that there might be an issue, but it is very clear why they have been removed.

This shows how incredibly flawed Facebook is in their application of community guideline rules. They never tell you why, they are just Kafkaesque telling you that you have broken the unwritten law, but they won't tell you what the law is.

Conclusion

If I break a rule or community guidelines, I need to know why so I won't do it again. I don't think it is too difficult to let me know what I have done wrong.

It is 2024 and we have so many tools to help us in what we do and that is true for making sure that communities are fit for purpose.

Thank you for reading, and I hope this has given you a little food for thought.