Canceled with No Explanation
This fifty-year-old man is sitting in his garage in “time out.” He doesn’t know what he did to deserve it, but he was told he did something bad. Bad enough to be thrown off Facebook.
I follow a motorcycle instructor on YouTube. He is a certified motorcycle safety foundation instructor who decided to create safety instruction videos for the masses. His instruction is high quality and effective.
Kevin started his channel in 2006 and now has two hundred and twenty instructional videos with almost 240,000 subscribers and 24mm views. He achieved this level of success by posting high-quality ten-minute instructional videos every Friday since he started. I can honestly say, this man has made me a better and safer motorcyclist. I am sure he saved me from injury and maybe even saved my life.
And now he is banned on Facebook.
What struck me with his latest video, “Why is Facebook throttling MCrider? Time to stand up!,” is how gracious he is in the face of this apparent injustice. But the fact of the matter is, this man is being forced to respond like a child who was sent to his room by his parents. He is told he did something very wrong and can’t come out of his room until he tells his parent what he did to deserve this punishment.
So here is Kevin on this video trying to guess just what he did wrong to deserve this treatment from Facebook.
He initially concludes this must be a mistake.
This is Kevin’s first thought. He can’t for the life of him figure out what he possibly did or said in any of these videos that deserved banishment from the Facebook kingdom.
He starts by going through a litany of topics he does not talk about.
No politics
No pandemic
No left or right issues
Here is the message he received when he tried to post his latest Friday instructional video: “This page isn’t allowed to advertise because it has repeatedly posted content that has been debunked by third-party fact-checkers.”
He tried to pursue this by clicking on all the presented Facebook links and quickly hit a dead end. He followed all the links provided by Facebook, and the clearest information he received was that his organization is publishing “fake news.” In fact, the Facebook canned message said his “site has a history of publishing fake news.”
And then in good web etiquette, the Facebook page ended with, “Was this information helpful?”
The power of Facebook is this: They won’t tell Kevin what misleading information they think he is publishing, but they will tell everyone in the world, the information he shares is misleading.
So it forces this poor guy who makes his living on MCrider to guess what he did wrong. Here is his list of guesses.
1. He is a Christian. He shared his faith in six of his two hundred and twenty videos. He did not denigrate anyone’s faith. He just shared his story and beliefs.
2. He teaches individual responsibility in riding a motorcycle. He believes we should never put our safety in the hands of another driver. He promotes riding your own ride and being alert to other drivers and hazards on the street.
3. He speculates the fact-checkers might have identified him as a man of white privilege. Maybe they concluded he was racist because of his personal philosophy of individual responsibility.
In the end, he is left with no answer. He is dealing with the consequences of a sin his accusers believe he committed.
So he goes on.
“If you want to ban me because I am a Christian, fine. I’ll take that.
“If you want to ban me because I believe my fellow human beings have worth and value and are capable of unimaginable heights if we help them and get out of their way, fine. I’ll take that, too.”
In the end, he says, “If you want to sit down with me and discuss what the actual problem is, I’m fine with that, too. What you should not be able to do is label my words as false to my friends and viewers without telling me what the problem is.”
He still believes this is all a mistake. He can’t for the life of him think of anything he did or said which should warrant these accusations without explanation.
He is begging Facebook to just talk to him. If it is a mistake, he’ll forgive them and go on with his business. If he did publish something false, he’ll fix it and go on with his business.
I wrote this because his video greatly disturbed me. The power of Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon is incredible. I stayed out of this social discourse in the past because I deemed it all political. But now I realize it is not.
They are “Big Brother.” Really. Why?
They can shut us up whenever they want for whatever reason they want. And they don’t have to explain anything. In fact, they don’t have any systems in place to explain their actions. They only have systems in place to shut us down, to cancel us.
What are we to do?