Grammarians, Gulags, and Skynet

I've been tossed into a Facebook dungeon cell exactly once in my social media career, for poking fun at a comment - and at myself - by pointing out a grammatical error.

The act wasn't the issue, the meme I shared in the process was:

Some may believe that such satirical riffs are inappropriate or insensitive trivializations. That's their right, of course, and one has to know one's audience in such matters. Just as I wouldn't tell rape jokes at a survivor's meeting, I'd be circumspect in using such imagery in the wrong place. However, the social justice extension of such discretion to censorship and cancellation is not only wrong, it is offensive in its own right, grossly censorious, and infantilizing. George Carlin tears all this down, in typically brilliant fashion:

Facebook doesn't get this. More accurately, Facebook's bots and algorithms don't get this. Irony and satire appear to be beyond the company's programmer's abilities. Or, perhaps, the programmers themselves don't get irony.

I was reminded of my brief stint in Facebook's Gulag (Fulag?) by the jailing of an acquaintance in my "home base" Facebook group over a comment that proved how insipidly inadequate those algorithms are. Nestled amongst a string of appropriately themed comments under a share of a National Review article titled Ban the Jelly-Filled Doughnut was this referential irreverence:

I will fight to the death to defend the sanctity of the lemon-filled donut!

Thirty days in the Fulag.

Just as I was reading about this farce, another friend informed me (via Facebook's Messenger - bans don’t extend that far) that he was given ninety days in the cooler. For an unknown transgression. Not only unknown, but unknowable.

Captain Hilts only got 20 days, and that was from an actual Nazi (a movie facsimile, but you get the idea).

Franz Kafka could not be reached for comment.

My banned-until-autumn friend surmises that Facebook tallies social media scores on each of us, and uses those scores in managing our access. I think those "scores" are little more than tallies of past infractions, no matter how invalid or absurd, and puts us in various levels of "probation" based on that tally. As in, if you've never been Fulaged, you're less likely to trip the bots' alarms, and it's not an active 'target the non-leftists' so much as 'target that which we don't like and tally up who gets snared, no matter how absurdly.' As I find myself often pointing out, one can be a Machiavellian genius or a dolt, but not both. I'm quite fond of the Hanlon's Razor version of this observation:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,

and I keep it in my critical thinking toolbox alongside several other forms of test.

Science fiction writer and libertarian thinker Robert A. Heinlein has his own version:

There's a subtle difference in the application of these versions of the aphorism. An algorithm can be 'stupid,' as can be the programmer who wrote it, in that it's incapable of recognizing even obvious irony, satire, or sarcasm, but that doesn't excude ill intent. This "bug" may be deemed a "feature," we all know that progressives are congenitally humor-impaired, and it's also beyond doubt that the Left can't meme.

We can conclude there's villainy afoot at Facebook, but also conclude they are bumbling fools who produce more stupidity than nefarity (not a word, but it should be).

Yes, conflating a Facebook suspension with the Soviets' Gulags by calling it Fulag is a trivialization, just as is using Nazi references for picayunity about grammar. Yet, Grammar Nazi has become a common idiom, and normal humans are perfectly capable of using both bits of satire without diminishing the horrors of either the USSR or the Third Reich.

If I were to look for a silver lining in all this, it's the realization that the machines are very far from taking over. If this is the best a half-trillion-dollar company can do, we are a lot further from a SkyNet event than the more paranoid among us proclaim.

The only reason any of this matters is because Facebook (and its embarrassing cousin, Twitter) has grown to its current size and ubiquity. While younger people eschew it in favor of Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, Facebook remains one of the big boys on the block. The temptation born of its massive growth proves the old adage that power corrupts. The risk that others who've grown stinking drunk with power (see: our government) buys or accesses Facebook's Fulag records at some point and uses them to infringe on our rights even more than they do.

New York State, in a petulant tantrum over the Supreme Court's ruling that its apparatchiks can't simply say "no" to gun carry permit applicants, now requires applicants to cough up three years of social media history, to prove they are of "good moral character." How long before that sort of thing expands beyond the much-hated gun rights community? How long before an unspoken equivalent of China’s Social Credit Score filters into our interactions with government?

Silly me. It’s already happening. Seems the NSA and others no longer need to data-mine us, and risk violating the Constitution. They just have to buy the data. The private sector is doing the job, and likely much better.

Only time will tell how this shakes out - whether overreaches piss people off enough to react or demand action, and whether the Court - seemingly our last bastion of liberty, slaps the government down.

Meanwhile, we can take a bit of solace in their relative incompetence. If they were really as smart as they think they are, they’d have done a much better job managing us.

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Yours in liberty,

Peter.