Facebook and gun posts?

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Trent

Trent

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OK I was looking back through my Facebook timeline for a photo I took last year, and discovered that at SOME point, every pro-gun post with an image, and every image I posted containing a picture of a firearm, were marked "Album: Me Only" by someone, at some point in time.

The images / posts affected, range in dates from December 2012 through May 2013.

Any pro-gun protest pictures, pictures of firearms, political slogans, etc were set to private so they wouldn't appear on my timeline for anyone else to view.

Text-only status updates, gardening photos, landscaping photos from the same time period that I posted were still public.

Anyone else ever have this happen?

Two examples (of dozens) below for reference as to what type of stuff was marked private.

R0K24lI.jpg

6wJutk9.jpg
 
I seriously doubt facebook has the time to filter out all political opinions they don't agree with. What probably happened is some update of the privacy policy put them in a more restricted category. Did you perhaps link/upload them differently than your unaffect pics?
 
They were in an album I'd maintained for "Gun Rights" photos (and named the same). The security settings on that album - and it alone - was changed for "Only Me".

I've used that album for quite a while - people had commented on those photos before. I used it extensively up until we got concealed carry passed, then it fell in to dis-use. I hadn't touched it in months. Sometime between then and now, the security was changed, knocking all of the pro-gun photos off my timeline.

*I* certainly wouldn't have done that. :)
 
Also, since it was just the one album, pretty easy to flip it back to public; just odd, when I went looking through my timeline for some landscaping photos that all my gun photos had a padlock in the lower right corner, and the two-tone border surrounding them.

I know that there are *tons* of employees and unpaid volunteers (interns) which do content management on facebook, that have full access to everyone's everything.

Wonder if an anti-gun staffer stumbled on my timeline at some point and decided to pull the prank. Less likely to notice a security setting change than an entire album being deleted, or something.
 
I am a member of several Facebook gun buy/sell groups. Which I have both bought and sold on.
 
A pro gun post that I have been sharing every day is no longer available on my page. At least I can't find it.
 
HoosierQ said:
I get zillions of pro-gun things from "friends" all the time. There seems to be no filtration.
Click to expand...

Yeah I'm a member of a lot of gun / reloading groups on Facebook (admin on a few too), and never had any issues.

Don't know if this was a one-off fluke, or what.

I remember reading a story about content reviewers getting paid for counseling because of all the horrific stuff they have to view while doing their jobs; guy went in to great detail about how all the reviewers can view anyone's content, including private messages, in that article. (The article was about the nasty job of doing content filtering at Google/Facebook/etc, particularly with child porn, and interviewed several paid and unpaid staffers who have that ugly task. People don't tend to last long at that job, staring at the worst humanity has to offer 8 hours a day has to take a toll.)

Anyway, last year I'd engaged in some lively debates with anti-gunners on facebook, I'm sure at some point one or more of my pro-gun posts was flagged for review.
 
Never had a problem though I am not much the user. Friends and family complained I had no avatar image (or whatever it's called) so I finally uploaded me shooting my M1A off the bench. I have also posted other gun pictures.

Ron
 
I don't put anything personal on it so literally every post I do is pro gun/Second Amendment pictures/posts similar to the top one in your original post. If anyone wants to know what I'm up to they can still call or text me. :)
 
Yeah I don't think this was facebook, proper, doing it.

But I'm not ruling out an overzealous intern at the heat of the gun debate last summer, doing it.

It's probably been this way for many months. I don't often go back and look through my timeline for things; posting several times a day pro-gun stuff, every single day..

My posts are about 20% kids and puppies, 20% gardening, 10% fishing / outdoors, and 50% gun related. :)
 
If enough people with "attitudes" flag it, it may get reviewed by staff for content. Who knows, maybe one of them is anti-gun and flipped the switch "accidently"?
 
When I saw this I went back and checked my timeline. I have not checked them all (but I will ) but several of my pro gun posts and pics are now marked "friends" rather than public, as they were originally. And all my posts were originally public.

There may be something to this.

But again, on further inspection, ALL my posts are now marked friends. And I know that I did not change this. As someone suggested, it may be an "update" thing or an accident, but someone besides me has changed the settings.
 
I just checked all of mine and everything I post is “Public” and still is. And probably 95% of my posts and pictures are either pro-2A or anti-obama.
 
I've posted hundreds if not thousands of pro gun posts on my facebook page, and have never had anything edited, deleted, tampered with, or anything else of a sinister nature My facebook content has never changed unless I've changed it. I've read about others who have been banned, had inflammatory posts removed, and the like, but can honestly say its never happened to me no matter how extreme the post or its content.
 
Why are you using Facebook? Have you ever heard of data mining programs. One can be specifically written to gather pro-gun data. Originally it started out to gather data for marketing but it has gone way beyond that now. You no longer have control of any information that you put on a public forum. You may think you do but there is really no way to know for sure. FB is just a sophisticated public forum with control options. Do you actually think they do what you think they do, I don't.
 
CoalTrain; You think there's a difference between "public" (social media) and "private" sites? Anything you put out on the internet can be subpoenaed for evidence. Even private messages on privately owned bulletin boards like this one. If Derek got a court order for a user he'd have to mine out all the user's data and hand it over, or risk having the entire server(s) seized as evidence. (Sometimes they still ask for that, and you have to fight it).

I run a couple of datacenters, and do hosting for Fortune 500's. Stuff like that is far more common than most people realize.

It's also absolutely frightening, what they'll come in and do at gun point, without any technical guidance about what belongs to who, or what goes where.

This one event in Texas, was particularly horrifying for every datacenter / hosting operator in the country to read about:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/04/data-centers-ra/

Simpson reported that 50 businesses lost access to their e-mail and data as a result of the raid. Some of those clients are phone companies, and the loss of their equipment has meant that some of their customers lost emergency 911 access.
Click to expand...

The same applies to your computer system. I've *actually done* forensic work before on computer workstations, and trust me, the programs that are out there to cover your search history tracks don't do you a damn bit of good. Formatting a drive doesn't do any good.

And since the NSA has got so remarkably good at beam splitting and setting up man in the middle attacks using clones of the root CA SSL certs, even encrypted data over the internet has to be assumed "compromised".

Very few ways to be secure online, nowadays, regardless of what platform you use; public social media, or private BBS's.
 
No changes like that to my posts either. Facebook is always making changes, though, so anything is possible. While it doesn't appear to be a global change, your one-off theory has some merit.
 
Coaltrain49:
Why are you using Facebook? Have you ever heard of data mining programs. One can be specifically written to gather pro-gun data. Originally it started out to gather data for marketing but it has gone way beyond that now. You no longer have control of any information that you put on a public forum. You may think you do but there is really no way to know for sure. FB is just a sophisticated public forum with control options. Do you actually think they do what you think they do, I don't.
Click to expand...


Yep, Facebook is "free" because YOU are the product.
 
I hate facebook. I wish it would die and Mark Zuckerberg can go suck on an egg. I have seen things like this as well where it seems that facebook is censoring people's posts.
 
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