Notwithstanding my rock-hardened but still enjoyable age as a midway octogenarian, I’ve got my computer skills and Internet manners at my fingertips. I now reminisce with a smirk how gingerly and fearfully I had stepped into the then hardly developed electronic world to try my intellectual abilities and my readiness to embrace the rapidly advancing new, chilling epoch of the www age. At that uncertain time, I could not see myself, even in my wildest imagination, sitting and tinkering with an unexpected magic like Facebook – the entire world, inside and out, ensconced in my little palm. All of a sudden, everything changed so drastically and vertiginously that a regular mind found it difficult to catch up with the surfeit of electronic novelties. Many of us, the folks of my age, got inflicted with, let’s call it, Internet-and-computer phobia. Not me, though! I valiantly entered the battle and here we go – all the money I currently make is coming from electronic means and ways, and nothing is going to stop my self-development.
I am operating on the Internet on a 24/7 basis, connecting all I am doing in life with the new mutual domain of our lives, but behold, Facebook has enough power, right, and temerity to voluntarily block features, restrict accounts, and cause service interruptions, based on its claim to protect the integrity of this or that platform under the pretext that it maintains security by means of enforcing the Community Standards. Personally, to me, these kinds of actions seem to be extremely troublesome, but I also understand that they are often designed to restrict bots, abuse, and security threats. This is all good, but when they block me and I am not given a reason for stopping my endeavor to survive, it is not simply irritating, but absolutely frustrating and nerve-wracking.
To calm myself down and to somehow maintain my normal rhythm of life, I went into thorough research of the situation by understanding what I am having to do with in actuality in terms of automated security and anti-spam measures. As I have learned, Facebook uses algorithms and AI to regulate patterns sooner than personal actions, when its systems sense risks like sending too many friend requests, liking too many posts, posting in many groups, frequent device switching, posting the same link, sending the same comment an overly numerous number of times, etc. All this may cause this or that system to temporarily block our ability to post. This is just some of the reasons why we get hampered and kept in electronic custody, and why Facebook restricts or blocks users who violate their policies.
And violations include hate speech, harassment, nudity, or misinformation; using fake names; impersonating others; or managing pages with fake profiles, all conducive to causing an account to be disabled and leading to a temporary or permanent ban. There is another streak to the whole thing: sometimes Facebook voluntarily brings down parts of its service to perform upgrades, by telling us ‘Facebook will be back soon,’ which normally means the company is making improvements to the database where our account is stored. Sometimes, the updates get procrastinated, which might be a reason that some of us have access while others don’t.
To continue, Facebook also has a habit of monitoring threats in real time, which involves augmented security measures limiting functionality in regions facing political unrest or high risks of violence. In the process of my ardent research, I also learned that some of Facebook’s mandatory measures may last from one to thirty days, restricting specific actions like posting, messaging, or advertising. And most importantly, it seems like the total loss of access usually occurs in cases of repeated violations.
This is all well understood, but would it not be more civil to use some affordable decorum and tell a poor user that something bad is happening to him or her, to let them have some patience and stay happy until the service is revived? This is a question of a victim, kept in darkness for days, having suffered a huge setback in things he is trying to bring to a successful end, to the benefit of this nation and for some personal advantage too.
BLOG by Nugzar B. Ruhadze
