The Tucker Carlson Video that Broke Facebook's Corner of the Internet

When Truth Violates the Terms and Conditions of a Social Media Platform, the Truth Must Yield!

Whenever the Truth violates a social media platform’s terms and conditions, the Truth must yield. That’s the lesson I learned after a video I shared from Tucker Carlson apparently broke Facebook’s corner of the Internet.

Truth Violates Fakebook’s Terms & Conditions

Facebook’s Limited Usefulness

I’m not as active on Facebook these days, partly because of incidents like this, but also because the good old days of using the site for free marketing are long gone: regardless of your Fakebook audience’s size — and mine was never very large to begin with — only a tiny handful will ever see your posts, unless you are willing to spend big money on advertising. Any audience you build on Fakebook belongs to Fakebook, which effectively places them (mostly) behind a paywall. Maybe that’s smart business strategy on Fakebook’s part, but it undermines the only (in my mind) productive use of the platform.

I still have a slight presence there because of pages and groups that I built up in the past, so I’ll occasionally post things there just in case someone sees it and clicks on the link. I know the “smart” strategy for content creators is to engage with people directly on Fakebook, but I can probably count on one finger the number of insightful and interesting discussions I’ve seen on that site in the past couple years. Unless you play the “clickbait” game by creating a bunch of emotionally-charged but intellectually shallow posts, you won’t get much organic reach. To me, it’s worth it to “post-and-ghost” using old pages and groups, but I can’t think of a scenario where it would be worth it to try to build a presence on Fakebook from scratch today.

But incidents of obviously partisan censorship, like this, make me wonder if it’s even worth staying on Facebook for the limited purpose of leveraging my existing audience there — or what small remnant I’m still able to reach organically — to promote my off-Fakebook activities.

Truth Violates Fakebook’s Terms and Conditions

So what heinously evil video did I post that violated Fakebook’s terms and conditions? Just this little gem from Tucker Carlson about China’s undue influence among the USA’s political class:

I posted this video a few days ago on my own personal timeline and on a page that I created and of which I am the sole administrator. When I logged on to Fakebook today, I was informed that by posting this video I had violated their terms and conditions about spam content.

Why was this spam? Facebook did not provide an explanation, other than to link to their terms and conditions, which are so lengthy and so intentionally vague as to provide no explanation whatsoever.