Sorry, but I don’t buy Facebook’s explanation for deleting The Kansas Reflector | Opinion

What Facebook did to The Kansas Reflector and Kansas on Thursday was unconscionable and unacceptable, and their halfhearted apology (delivered via another social network!) doesn’t even begin to make up for it.

Facebook deplatformed one of the most reliable news sources providing information on Kansas state government on a critical day in the Legislature.

Facebook also removed thousands of posts that users had shared of Reflector content across years.

And Facebook wrongly accused thousands of Kansas residents (myself included) thusly: “It looks like you tried to gather sensitive information, or shared malicious software.”

We of course did nothing of the sort. We simply shared well-reported news stories about our state.

From my timeline, Facebook spiked a Reflector story from 2021 titled: “Kris Kobach takes aim at law prohibiting felons from possessing firearms.” It’s hard to see how that violated “terms and conditions.”

Other Kansans report dozens of Reflector stories that they’d shared were summarily spiked, and they weren’t offered the chance to appeal the decision on most of them.

The Reflector’s ability to post stories to Facebook has been restored, with this message from Facebook PR flack Andy Stone: “This was an error that had nothing to do with the Reflector’s recent criticism of Meta (Facebook’s parent company). It has since been reversed and we apologize to the Reflector and its readers for the mistake.”

That’s all.

Weirdly, it was posted on a competing social network, Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter.

As far as I can tell, Andy doesn’t even have a page on his own social network.

After his sincere non-explanation, Andy got back to his real job — being on X all day opposing any legislation to require Facebook to behave like a responsible corporate citizen.

Both myself and Eagle investigative reporter Chance Swaim have tried to contact Facebook/Meta — although we knew before we started that it’s a waste of time and typing.

Their corporate phone number is a we-don’t-give-a-bleep recording that hangs up on you after two repeats. And their so-called media relations department is where press emails go to die.

Absent any sort of meaningful dialog from Facebook/Meta, we have to read tea leaves to try to figure out what really happened to Kansas on Thursday.

Right-wing ragebait posts proliferate

Conservatives have complained for years that Facebook was killing their posts. My experience has been exactly the opposite.

For many months, my feed has been clogged with right-wing ragebait posts. They’re the same fake stories, over and over, where the names are changed but the tune stays the same:

▪ Famous NFL or college football coach kicks star player(s) off roster for kneeling during national anthem.

▪ NFL team (insert name) threatens mass walkout if management signs Colin Kaepernick as quarterback.

▪ Lia Thomas (transgender swimmer) is kicked off a swim team she was never on.

▪ Lia Thomas forced to relinquish all medals and titles to (anti-trans swimmer) Riley Gaines.

▪ Something something Dylan Mulvaney something something Bud Light something something Garth Brooks.

It’s all bull, but right-wingers take their confirmation bias seriously and would dutifully like and comment by the thousands.

The purveyors of this nonsense had two tricks for getting around Facebook content monitoring:

1) If you read the fine print, they admitted it was all fabricated, but claimed it was “satire,” which means it doesn’t have to be true to post it on Facebook.

2) They wouldn’t post the actual story, just a picture and a caption inviting readers to see the full story in the comments section. If anybody filed a complaint, Facebook’s AI (which stands for Artificial Idiot) would evaluate the picture and decide “Nope, nothing wrong here.”

Since Facebook crashed The Reflector on Thursday, my daily dose of fake right-wing outrage posts has dropped from about one per hour to one per day.

So my working theory is that Facebook turned loose some sort of Terminator bot to clean up the site, and The Reflector was collateral damage, because the AI couldn’t tell the difference between fake news and news out of the Kansas Legislature, which always borders on the surreal.

But I could be wrong and there are two other prominent theories.

One is that it was Facebook’s retaliation for a story The Reflector posted titled “When Facebook fails, local media matters even more for our planet’s future.” Andy Stone denies that, but we’ll have just to take his word for it since he offers no alternative explanation.

In any case, let this story act as a test case. I plan to post it on Facebook as soon as I’m done writing it, and we’ll see if they retaliate against me or The Eagle.

Another theory is that Kansas Republicans, who pretty much hate The Reflector for exposing the ongoing follies of our GOP-dominated Legislature, figured out a way to file enough complaints in a short enough time to trigger Facebook’s algorithm to act against the news site.

So Andy Stone, if you’re reading this, your company damaged the reputation of one of our state’s best news sources and in the process falsely accused untold thousands of Kansans of being cybercriminals.

So pardon us if we decline to accept your apology until and unless you provide a more detailed explanation to back it up.

Like the song says: “I just met you, and this is crazy. But here’s my number, so call me, maybe.”

316-268-6527.