International Lord of Hate Larry Correia suspects foul play from Facebook in regard to his most recent BOOK BOMB.
TL; DR: Larry Book Bombed his departed friend Zach’s posthumous first novel, hoping to drive sales and boost the book’s Amazon ranking as much as possible. That means getting as many eyesballs on the Book Bomb as possible. But he found that Facebook was only showing his posts to a fraction of his thousands-strong following.
Facebook, ostensibly a social network designed to connect people, appears to be throttling users–deliberately withholding their posts from wide circulation and showing them only to a small number of users’ friends.
What’s FB’s motive? Larry suspects Facebook of using throttling to strong-arm users into buying ads on the site. Want your post seen by all your followers? Then pay up.
Best selling author Brad Torgersen backs up Larry’s observation and notes that FB seems to target posts with outside links for throttling. His description of Facebook as “a hot mess of bots and algorithms” seems quite apt.
Not coincidentally, Parliament recently slapped another unflattering label on Facebook, calling the company, “digital gangsters”.
Facebook broke the law in its quest to destroy other businesses and behaved like a ‘digital gangster’, MPs say
- The Culture Committee report says Facebook would ‘starve’ other tech companies of data to destroy their business model
- Documents seized from Mark Zuckerberg also reveal it was willing to override users’ privacy settings to transfer data to other developers to make money
- The report, published today, calls for an investigation by the Information Commissioner, and the Competition and Markets Authority
- Facebook denied that it had broken anti-competition and data privacy laws
Larry and friends appear to have found a workaround. Links appearing in comments and videos embedded directly into Facebook seem exempt from throttling. If you still use Facebook and want anyone to see your links, you’d be well advised to try it.
When prominent conservative authors are having their posts throttled by one of the biggest big tech companies, you have to wonder if petty greed is the only motive at work. We already know that fellow social network Twitter actively censors conservative accounts. Facebook themselves have been caught engaging in censorship. Is it beyond the pale to suspect that FB’s throttling disproportionately targets users who dissent from the Narrative?
To paraphrase Warpig’s Laws of Twitter, these sites are so poorly programmed that malfunctions are indistinguishable from malice. At the same time, the people in charge use their shoddy platforms as fig leaves for their malice.
One thing is certain. Rough times lie ahead for anyone who’s unwilling to publicly profess his love for Big Brother. Support honest creators who are working hard to entertain you, as Larry and Brad are, and as Zach did before his untimely death.
Consider my own humble offerings. My thrilling mech Mil-SF novel Combat Frame XSeed is available now, and you can back the earth-shattering sequel Combat Frame XSeed: Coalition Year 40 on Indiegogo. Claim amazing perks, and get the book first!
