The Missing Pieces



Has Facebook conspired with my husband to curtail my nagging?  True story … the other night I was in the other room, and as I am not very ambulatory very often, I sent the redneck a Facebook message asking if he’d come check on me every now and Zen.  The original message in tact is still visible on both of our android phones.  However when we view the thread on the web, Facebook has inserted a BLOCKED CONTENT ban on my post.  Apparently … for reasons I can not fathom the words “can you please check on me often” were censored by the social media machine.  Seriously?  What if I had said, once or twice?  or maybe I should have added pretty please?  No doubt if I put a smilie emoticon at the end of it, it would have been fine.  Because you can say anything if you end your note with LOL or a 🙂 and it forgives a world of improprieties, right?

Clearly there’s a bug.  Some algorithm that goes through your private messages has a fluke in its data dictionary and picked up my sentence and flagged it for content.  Wait a minute … did you catch that?  Some BOT reads each and every word in each and every post that you send “privately” to a friend.   I realize of course, this isn’t news.  We all new this.  I’ve posted about this before and everyone knows social networking isn’t private.  Dang, we should have understood that email isn’t ever private after the last election.

But by in large we love a good hack, don’t we?  Doesn’t matter if the Russians did it or the girl next door.  We like digging up dirt.  I mean you have to stand behind your words right?  That’s the thing about the DNC email hack, besides the point that the contents have been so misquoted, taken out of context, and misattributed beyond any semblance of validity, if we got a good MEME out of it we are satisfied.  Keep in mind though .. the contents of the RNC email hacks (it would be naive to think data was not stolen all across the board) wasn’t made public.  Do you honestly believe there was no dirt to dig?  We need to be mindful that everyone has an agenda.  Its unfathomable that no one got a glimpse of Trumps taxes.  Or there wasn’t a smoking rifle in the garbage pile of republican emails, messengers and snapchats.  Of course there was.  But we only saw (or focused) on one side of the sound-bytes.

If you believe Trump, then you should send important messages via hand courier.   You know … like we did in HIGH SCHOOL when we passed notes to our friends in between classes.  Nothing ever went wrong there ye?  Half of you just cringed as you remembered a time when the Algebra teach confiscated a folded note and read it in front of the whole class.

Technology makes it easier for people to keep in contact.  And the cogs that turn the machine also make it that much easier to be misunderstood, tampered  or otherwise altered or in some cases blocked censored diverted because apparently you aren’t on the need to know list. But you know, no harm intended.

And by the way, I did a second test today by typing that exact phrase “can you please check on me often” in a FB message to my daughter.  And though it was visible for a while, by night fall the powers that FB removed the content by nightfall.  

Words matter … what we say, stays longer in the mind than in the memory, unless of course its gone missing.

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