{"id":20178959,"date":"2025-01-15T08:30:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-15T16:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.metrosiliconvalley.com\/?p=20178959"},"modified":"2025-01-15T00:05:18","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T08:05:18","slug":"how-facebook-weeds-out-cannabis-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.metrosiliconvalley.com\/how-facebook-weeds-out-cannabis-content\/","title":{"rendered":"How Facebook Weeds Out Cannabis Content"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Even in this age of shamelessness, it\u2019s been astonishing to watch business leaders bend the knee<\/a> to Donald Trump as he prepares to take office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Newspaper owners like the Los Angeles Times<\/em>\u2019 Patrick Soon-Shiong and the Washington Post<\/em>\u2019s Jeff Bezos, after years of staying mostly hands-off, have suddenly forced their journalists to move in a pro-Trump direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CEOs of companies including Apple (Tim Cook) Uber (Dara Khosrowshahi) and Amazon (Bezos again) have written million-dollar checks to Trump’s inaugural committee, forsaking their basic human dignity in return for government perks including, perhaps \u201cnot going to prison.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But no mogul has debased himself more than Facebook\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg (whom Trump has threatened with a life sentence<\/a>). He cut the check. He bent the knee. But he also publicly and explicitly signed on with Trump\u2019s authoritarian cause, declaring in the name of \u201cfree speech\u201d that the fading social-media service he started as a way to rate the attractiveness of college women will now allow all kinds of bigotry and dangerous conspiracy theories to be posted unchecked. (While he was at it, he ordered that tampons be removed from the company\u2019s men\u2019s rooms. Really<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, if you search on Facebook (or Instagram, or Threads) for \u201ccannabis,\u201d you\u2019ll be out of luck, and if you mention weed, you still might be censored. That was really weird even before all this, but it\u2019s far weirder now that Facebook users are allowed to say, for instance, that Covid vaccines might kill you or that being gay or trans is a symptom of \u201cmental illness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company isn\u2019t talking outside of issuing statements and having its weird, pallid CEO go on Joe Rogan to say all kinds of loopy shit, like how American business needs more \u201cmasculine energy<\/a>.\u201d But it appears that, as before, Facebook still considers cannabis an illegal \u201cdrug\u201d and will continue to block searches and even censor content (albeit in a haphazard, impossible-to-predict fashion). In its announcement of the policy changes, Facebook stated that it will \u201ccontinue to focus on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, like terrorism, drugs, fraud and scams.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, presumably, you can tell people to inject bleach or declare that their sexuality is a sickness, but don\u2019t go talking about how high you got last night, or (more to the point, really) how weed helped get you off fentanyl or relieved your chronic pain. Also, don\u2019t talk about how you want to blow up the Washington Monument, which is nearly as bad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHaphazard and impossible-to-predict\u201d is a wild understatement. Facebook\u2019s content \u201cmoderation\u201d has always been something of a joke. For years, I have periodically reported a particular page that\u2019s full of horrifying racism and clearly violates the company\u2019s terms of service, only to be told, every time, that in fact it doesn\u2019t. And there is a ton of weed-oriented stuff on Facebook, including whole pages and groups dedicated to the topic, that goes entirely uncensored, often for years. At the same time, though, other weed content is subject to being vaporized, and nobody knows what the criteria are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the bigger problem is that searches for cannabis content are blocked by keyword. The cannabis-policy news site Marijuana Moment took note<\/a> of the continued censorship last week. Reporter Ben Adlin reported that \u201ceven when searching for accounts that merely regulate state-legal marijuana, engage in political advocacy or simply report news related to the issue,\u201d you can\u2019t find them via Facebook search. \u201cA query for \u2018Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission,\u2019 \u2018Marijuana Policy Project,\u2019 or \u2018Marijuana Moment,\u2019 for example, yields no results and instead displays a notice encouraging users: \u2018If you see the sale of drugs, please report it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It should be noted that you can find those pages via Google.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this mess highlights how difficult it is to moderate content on a large social-media site, even when you have the best of intentions, as Facebook once pretended it had. But it also highlights how terrible Facebook in particular has always been on this score. It has changed moderation strategies so often over the years that it ultimately became impossible to gauge their effectiveness beyond concluding that it wasn\u2019t very effective at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if you still need a reason to abandon Facebook and all of Meta\u2019s social-media sites, the fact that you can\u2019t search on \u201ccannabis\u201d but you can search on the N-word should be enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s weird you might be censored for mentioning weed on Facebook and not, for instance, saying that Covid vaccines might kill you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14789,"featured_media":20178961,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_expiration-date-status":"","_expiration-date":0,"_expiration-date-type":"","_expiration-date-categories":[],"_expiration-date-options":[]},"categories":[10633],"tags":[230,13643,293],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\n\n\n\n\t\n\t\n\t\n