Friday, September 22, 2023

Censorship in 2023: I am angry!

I am very disappointed, offended, insulted, angry. Well, I have gotten some of those feelings out into these words and feel very slightly better. As a physician I know that bottling up and burying feelings of anger and frustration are not good for our physical health. But I never thought I would be faced with such a cause for all this frustration in 2023 in the United States of America. I have been a user of Facebook for many many years. Most of my blogs here are informational and sometimes personal, but I like to think usually examples of fairly OK writing and my hope was always that they would provide some value to others by representing both educational topics and just topics about living life during the last 13 years of my postings. I wrote a blog here, the one previous to this one, dated May 2023, entitled Delinquency. In it I apologized for not having posted in a long while. I also like to use these blogs aa an oral history of a time that was very trying for our world with Covid 19 and the results of this epidemic and also justaposting these historical times with my own personal trials of the last several years. I tried to post a link to the blog of May 2023 just now and it was censored by Facebook. I invite you to read this previous blog. It is the one just prior to this one that I am writing right now. I don't feel that it was exceptionally political. In fact I think it was rather factual. I would suspect that at least 2/3 of our current population in the United States if not more would agree with my concerns. It was not judgmental, it was not derogatory. It was as far as I can tell not racist, or homophobic or any other type of ...phobic. But Facebook judged it not fit for public consumption and censored me. Until I erased it, I was not allowed to post anything further on Facebook. Any way that I tried to get the link into a post on Facebook as I had done in the past, was censored. Finally I entered an incomplete link asking readers to guess the rest of the link so that some might find their way to my blog. Just as an aside, in the past I have done this many times, and there has been no problem Also in the past when I posted very frequently on the blog, you could find that blog just by googling "Renaissance Woman Retired" and the link would come up. Now since I have not been posting very much, that is no longer the case. More importantly, I would like my current readers here to read that former post at blogspot, and tell me what needed censoring there. I am just curious what my readers think. What did the current AI of Facebook identify that was unfit for general consumption? Yes there is a fairly dismal look at some of the current affairs around the world. So are we not allowed to look at bad situations, or negative outcomes? Are we expected as writers to only state "apple pie in the sky" pollyannaish views now? Is it a fact that human beings can't take a critical look at what is happening around our country, in our cities, at our border, and indeed in the world? If that is so, I feel we all have a lot to worry about. This post is critical and negative and so I am sure that Facebook will not allow it to be posted, so I will not even try. Therefore, I am resorting to my old standby, blogspot, to allow me to vent my frustrations. I think we have a lot to worry about here.

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