A Facebook mystery. Back in Oct & Nov 2019 I was getting so many threats each day on FB that I was able to construct a chart showing which threats sent to me were deemed a violation and which ones weren't. You can see this graphic here:
Today, I noticed that ALL those reports are gone from my support inbox, and only a few unrelated messages remain. These remaining messages all have update dates between May 7-23, 2020. Some examples below - note that even the violations are now marked "update soon".
I've said it for the umpteenth time, but Facebook reporting is thoroughly, truly, broken - and it's getting worse. They are not capable of managing this task, they delete the record of their failure, and they can not be trusted to keep people safe on the platform.
For the curious, I used CrowdTangle to find out where the harassment was coming from. I created a leaderboard for my own name and watched where the hate was coming from, then I went to those pages and reported the threats. Each threat takes 10 clicks to report.
The reason I had to use CrowdTangle is because Facebook's own internal search tools are too broken to do this task.
CrowdTangle costs $449 per month but I got it "free" because a research team I'm on won a grant to get access to some FB data, but they never provided it & gave us CrowdTangle instead. I now use it to track my own harassment on the platform, as well as for actual research.
update: I have been informed by @naomishiffman that Crowdtangle no longer costs money. Which is nice. But... it's not available to anyone but journalists and researchers. So if you're a regular user, even a rich one, you're out of luck.
I challenge Facebook to provide a better method for regular users to see who is harassing them on the platform. Furthermore, stop screwing with the support inbox.
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