Fans Demand Facebook Lift Its Ban on David Gerrold

Trolls abusing Facebook’s automated complaint system got David Gerrold banned for a post he made about Pride Month reports Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station. Here is an excerpt from Wright’s own comments about the situation, and the screencap is reproduced below.

The attached picture is a screencap, a short Facebook post written by an incredibly talented man. This man has quite literally written himself into the very fabric of history. You know him, even if you don’t know that you know him. Some of the ideas you have, some of the phrases you say, he wrote them and they became part of our culture. He is brilliant. He’s charming. He is fearless. He is kind and generous to a fault and far too tolerant of fools and the foibles of his fellow man.

He works every day to leave the world a better place for all Americans.

He also happens to be gay.

He also happens to be my friend, David Gerrold.

That post, the one attached below, was written by Gerrold in response to the hate LGBT people face every day. Every. Single. Day. Every. Day. Relentlessly. Hate he very much has personal experience with. Hate that I myself have witnessed firsthand.

Don’t believe me? About the hate?

That post, that innocuous post, got David banned from Facebook today.

No, it’s not the profanity. Profanity is not a violation of Facebook’s terms of use.

It’s the same thing that got me banned. A group of haters, small men, small in heart, small in vision, small in America, small in their small hate, abused Facebook’s automated complaint system to silence a man who spoke up for the rights of others.

To silence a man who spoke up for the rights of others.

And that is just about as unAmerican as it gets.

This must not stand. Not this month, not ever.

Wright calls on FB users to use its “Report a Problem” feature to call for the restoration of Gerrold’s FB access and his deleted post. At this time Wright’s message has received over 4,200 likes and been shared 1,684 times.

Here’s the text of Gerrold’s post, quoted with his permission.

19 thoughts on “Fans Demand Facebook Lift Its Ban on David Gerrold

  1. David Gerrold’s page looks fine to me, so I guess the complaints were successful.

  2. Liked, shared, and reported. Everyone with a FB account should do the same.

    @Lenore — When a person is banned from FB, their profile page remains. So it will look “normal” whether or not Gerrold has had his access restored. Please don’t assume anything just because his page is still up.

  3. Facebook has two billion users (more or less) currently. As much as I support symbolic campaigns, I think it’s really going to take a company like Apple doing a very public boycott.

    Oh both Facebook and Twitter are got booted from the iOS system for iPhones and iPads come the change over to iOS 11. Love to see what Apple says behind scenes when these companies come begging…

  4. Facebook’s a petty tyrant as such matters as the page that say it’s that of Peter S. Beagle is not such at all as its controlled by his very former manager. Well over a year ago, FB has told this was so but they refused to hand it over.

  5. @Cat Eldrigde: What Apple has done to Twitter and Facebook (and some other internet services) is that they have removed the OS-level integration, such as that lots of different apps could pull Facebook (or other) credentials from the OS instead of asking the user.

    But this is clearly a policy decision, and it impacts far more services than Facebook (or Twitter).

    From discussion on this, it seems relatively few apps used the system, and Apple instead chose to replace it with a more simple general password/account manager.

  6. Karl-Johan Norén notes From discussion on this, it seems relatively few apps used the system, and Apple instead chose to replace it with a more simple general password/account manager.

    The Apple central sites have said only Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo and Flickr are effected as only they had been integrated into the system with active support of Apple. This was done with the first release iOS 7 on Fall Equinox 2013.

  7. Huh I got nearly everything right on that Facebook moderator quiz basing my answers on their content guidelines and I don’t see how his post caused an issue?

  8. David Gerrold’s FB has been reinstated. He gives special thanks to Jim Wright and OGH.

  9. Glad to hear the forces of good prevailed.

    I missed all the action online what with having a life the past couple days. Well, that and Hugo reading. Does that count as having a life?

    Gonna take a quick look through here and then get back to “Raven Stratagem”.

  10. ‘Spite for small-minded people’ is a good enough reason for me to buy some of Gerrold’s books.

    Glad to see he got reinstated.

  11. Good heavens, half the time I can’t even get blatantly racist comments removed via the report system. Clearly someone must have figured out the right goat-chicken-cow combination sacrifice to activate the Facebook mods and they’re using their powers for pettiness.

  12. @Meredith

    I get the impression that the secret trick is to flood it with reports, and at some point FBs system assumes that the numbers mean there must be a real problem. Which is dumb, and frankly I think the chicken thing would work better 🙂

  13. @Mark:
    That’s pretty much my understanding as well, based on reports on anti-vaxxers using the FB reporting system to get people critical of them banned. And them crowing about it afterward.

    Fundamentally, it’s a system that rewards whoever can get the biggest collection of raving howler monkeys pointed in the right direction. And whoever has the fewest number of better things to do.

  14. This is another example of the intolerance that has become ever more the norm in our society today. It is very sad. I fear for the future of our nation.

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