As regular listeners will know, we here at Crossfire Radio are justifiably proud of our Forum. For posts, pictures, comments and search points, it really walks all over Facebook, who have in the last 18 months done everything they can to make it difficult for us to have any benefit from their Groups policy- unless of course, we pay!
Last month however, the reasons why we were right to start to push the Forum as our number one communication and interaction tool, became even more stark when I had a post removed by Facebook- and was given a warning for it- in our ROCK MUSIC GROUP. The post in question was the above picture, which FB said broke their terms and conditions on "decency".
The above picture is the cover of a Led Zeppelin album that was released in 1973 and has been in circulation ever since, in every record store, eBay, Amazon and so on. Yet FB have banned it.
Why?
There seems to be no contextual awareness by Facebook anymore, no attempt to apply common sense and thought to their decisions. Forget how they have misused our data, forget how they have hijacked the search points from your external links, forget how they are constantly pushing unwanted ads on you that are sex, religious or gambling based, forget that they allow fake news ads (that they know are fake but cos the advertiser paid for it, it is allowed), Facebook have now decided that to deflect from their inept management and policies, they will apply censorship to an easy target: ROCK MUSIC.
It is a return to the bad old days when the "moral minority" bought their way into positions of power and pushed the evils of the world onto "the devil's music", when albums were burned and banned and relabelled, and Ozzy Osbourne was responsible for all the evil in the world.
Since then we've had other incidents with listeners having their posts- again in our rock music group which is closed to non-members- removed by Facebook.
So now it is time. Move to our Forum. We're still adding new features, still tweaking the performance of it, but seriously it craps all over Facebook now for many reasons.
Not least of which, you can post your favourite album covers without being locked out and treated like a naughty child by a company that have no moral right to set themselves up to judge anyone's moral standing.
UPDATE: Within 120seconds of me putting the link for this blog in Facebook it was removed and I have been banned for 3 days. As it stands they have refused to tell me what "community standards" it broke and gave me no right to appeal. In effect, it comes down to they didn't like that I have criticised their platform, free speech in Facebook it would seem, is indeed freely available, so long as you pay for it.