I “like” Facebook when I do a nice post and dozens of people react and engage with it — like the fun Two Lobsters post I did on Sunday.
However, Facebook does not “like” me.
I don’t mean just the part about converting me into a “data packet” and selling me to advertisers.
I am referring to its firm policy of NOT fact-checking political ads (Associated Press) — essentially allowing politicians to lie to your “Face.”
By one calculation FB was projected to haul in $420 million in political advertising this year (CBS News).
However, when I try to use FB’s service to “boost” an honest satire post, it is invariably … REJECTED.
Example: Yesterday I did a satire post inspired by the video of Trump playing the fool during the singing of the National Anthem at his Super Bowl party? (Yes, the same tRump who called black NFL players protesting injustice “sons of bitches” and summoned nationwide scorn upon them for failing to “respect the flag” during that same song.)
I know not to expect any engagement on satire posts on my personal page. So, thinking it would be fun to get some eyeballs on the item and some reaction, I decided to post, and boost, it on a humor/satire page I started on FB years ago and pretty much abandoned.
REJECTED. As expected, because that was the outcome of several previous attempts to boost posts satirizing the president.
So I decided to try an experiment — to see if FB would reject even a ridiculously non-controversial Trump post.
I grabbed a picture of him in his MAGA cap giving the thumbs up and added a simple caption reading: “I don't like the looks of this guy. He doesn't seem trustworthy to me.”
Approximately 5.5 hours later(at 3:37 am this morning), Facebook notified me that my $5 “ad” was rejected.
If I really want to waste more of my time, I could “request a review” or dig deeper into their policies to better understand why Facebook will accept big-dollar ads allowing the president to lie to people (examples here), but reject something as simple and harmless as the item described and depicted above.
However, I think the more healthy option for me would be to establish a new personal policy strictly regulating the amount of time I waste on this out-of-control platform.
