Censorship and Facebook

"It's like twitter. Except we charge people to use it."

It's come to my attention that a link I posted to Facebook somewhat recently has been flagged as inappropriate "by Facebook users" and blocked.  I fully realize that Facebook needs to rely on its users to identify inappropriate content and select it for review, but I also expect that someone actually reviews content once in a while, or at the very least that some kind of mechanism exists for a ban to be contested (I can find none).

The content in the link I posted is a humourous article detailing an e-mail exchange between a frustrated designer and a client who did not want to pay.  There is maybe one graphic in the article that might be considered offensive to the sort of people who think that devils are playing tricks in their eyes and making the lights in the magic box dance in contemptuous shapes, but for anyone who's been on the internet at all in the last 20 years, this article is timid at best.

Here is the link again, and yes I am going to attempt to link here from Facebook.  http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p.html

In my mind, Facebook has been on a tremendous downhill slide over at least the past year, as the site has tried to become more and more like Twitter, and in the process has destroyed much of the functionality that made Facebook unique and attractive as a social networking platform.  Now, it very much is not, and I have to say that if I didn't already have an account with established connections, my incentive to create an account today would be nil.  I don't want to play games and be inundated with my contacts' progress in those games to no end, and the other features that once made Facebook exciting are now recreated and improved by other websites like Twitter, Flickr and LinkedIn, all of which I use regularly.

If Facebook wants to be the moral conscience of the internet, well good luck.  The internet is a community particularly well-known for rejection of censorship, and if that's the route they want to take, Facebook can easily censor itself out of existence.  And Facebook should have realized by now that trying to be Twitter is futile.  We already have a Twitter.  It's called Twitter.  And it has been so ridiculously successful in large part because there is no other Twitter, no competing standard, and everyone who uses a Twitter-like application [also] uses Twitter.  It's also successful because there is no option to block content (only users), meaning that if I post content I feel is harmless, and someone has a lame issue with it, it's their problem, not mine.

One of Facebook's potential niches is content-sharing, which is another thing it has in common with Twitter that Twitter does better.  By throwing up barriers to effective content sharing (like making it easy for potentially hostile users to make any content universally un-share-able) Facebook is shooting itself in the foot.

At this point I should note that the text I've associated with the link is from the article, and the fact that I'm ranting about how Facebook needs to be Facebook and leave the being Twitter to Twitter is actually coincidence.