Geoffrey Meredith
Thoughts on Technology

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I don't normally venture into the cesspit that is a Facebook discussion on anything political but recently I've been researching how people behave in these discussions.  I've noticed some interesting patterns.

When a hot topic like politics, covid vaccines, or masks come up it is descended upon by a huge number of anti-vax/anti-mask identities posting ridiculous, slanderous, and disgusting comments.   From time to time I've engaged some of these identities to see how they will react.  When I post a link to a credible source like the US CDC website and these will quickly get taken down by Facebook due to "spam".  Any human would recognize that these are not spam but these identities understand that they can gang up and mark a post as spam and remove any credible response to their disinformation.  You can dispute the comment being marked as spam but Facebook will not reinstate your comment.  Of course, being marked as a spammer a couple of times makes me concerned that Facebook might suspend my account, which is exactly what these identities want, they want to either get you suspended or prevent you from countering their disinformation.

I use the term "identity" and not "person" because often when I dig into the profiles of these accounts that are spewing disinformation, they look like bot accounts.  Often with no information and a generic picture, or with very limited amounts of information.