Figuring Out the Fact Check Shuffle

This post (below) keeps showing up claiming that their posts are being limited by a mysterious Facebook algorithm that limits your posts to just 25 people. It will automatically receive the dreaded "false information" tag and be blotted out. This makes people mad because the "KNOW" that Facebook is blocking them with some kind of algorithm. 

WELL THAT'S NOT WHAT'S HAPPENING.  

So technically the Fact Checkers are correct - it's misinformation.  Facebook isn't limiting you directly. Actually all your friends pages limit who they can see. Truth is, you are probably limiting which of their posts you can see because your account's newsfeed is set on a setting called "Top Stories" which gives Facebook permission to limit what posts you see in your newsfeed. Here's the post that turns out to be wrong on almost all counts except that you and your friends are limited as to what posts they can see.

• The post reads: Finally made it !! Thank you everyone for telling me how to bypass. Good to know: it’s ridiculous to have so many friends (692)and only 25 are allowed to see my posts I ignored all these posts earlier, but IT WORKS!! Thanks for the dribbling tip Facebook… Now I have a completely new profile. I see posts from people I haven’t seen in a long time. Facebook’s new algorithm chooses the same people — about 25 — who will see their posts. Press your finger anywhere in the post and click on “copy”. Go to your page and it says “what are you thinking about”. Tap your finger anywhere in the empty field. Click and paste. This will go around the system. Hello new and old friends hello Trying this because I just get adverts on my feed

And if the fact checkers flag you,
you've got to deal with these guys.

Turns out, because it's not Facebook that limits what we can see and the solution above is bogus, the fact checkers can label your post misinformation. The fact checkers are using a technicality to throw you off the scent. The fact check debunking of this posts exploits a misunderstanding as to what is actually going on. They want us to think that Facebook isn't limiting what we post and technically that's true, but it's a trick. The limiting is not happening to the "visibility of what we post." Limiting is still happening, just in a more stealthy way.

Your friends themselves (and probably you yourself) are collectively limiting what we can see of each others' posts. There is a setting on your newsfeed (where you should be seeing your friends' posts) that gives Facebook permission to limit what you see. The default setting is "Top Stories". This is the "curated" setting which filters out what FB thinks are unimportant posts and gives you what it believes is a "best of" assortment of posts; an assortment I might add that seems to lean decidedly in favor of either innocuous posts or posts which support the mainstream narrative. And we know which direction of that lean.

The good news is that you can solve the problem permanently. I'm not going to give you the convoluted process of switching your newsfeed from "Top Stories" where your views are limited to "Most Recent" where you see everything your friends post. It won't do you any good, because Facebook automatically switches you back to Top stories after a day or two and then you don't know you're being limited again and you have to go through the whole convoluted process of setting your newsfeed back to "Most Recent".

Here's what to do! There's a delightful little app called "Facebook Purity" that's free and downloadable. It's also called "Fluff Busting Purity" which for a while allowed people to post the link on Facebook. But Facebook caught on and blocked people from posting the link. Here on Blogger, I can, however post the link. And here's where to go to download it.

https://www.fbpurity.com/ 

Once you install it, it rides herd on your newsfeed setting and when Facebook tries to reset it to "Top Stories", FBP automatically resets your feed to "Most Recent".  FBP also helps you control other settings and improves your Facebook experience by letting you hide all the Ads, Suggested Posts / Related Posts / Sponsored Posts / Upcoming Events / Games your Friends are playing / Games You May Like / Similar To / Related Articles / More Like / More From etc.. It even lets you insure the posts on your newsfeed are in chronological order. This stops Facebook from putting 3 day old posts at the top of your newsfeed and keeps them coming in current time order. FBP also lets you create your own filters, block posts with specific words, turn off autoplay and a whole bunch of other things that let you see Facebook the way you want to see it without all the annoying fluff that comes with the default account setting Mr. Zuckerberg saddles you with when you sign on.

Keep an eye on your newsfeed, though. Facebook does an update ever once in a while and disables FBP. The developer is very good about coming up with a fix in short order. Sometimes FB even succeeds in removing the FBP icon so you can't use it. Just go to the website and reload it.

This app is really useful and it's FREE!  If you like it, it would be nice if you sent the guy a few bucks to say, "Thanks for making Facebook more like it ought to be and not what it is!"

Happy Facebooking all you subversives out there!

© 2023 by Tom King

2021 - Facebook Hides Newsfeed Controls....Again!

How to Reset Your Facebook Newsfeed to See All Your Friends Uncensored.

Facebook really doesn't want to let all that research they did with the US government back in the Obama administration go to waste. There was a study Zuckerberg et al were caught doing some years back in which they screened the posts that Facebook members were receiving. The idea was to find out whether screening out angry conservative posts from members, made the more passive and receptive to the calming and enlightened progressive messages they put in their place. 

First Facebook rigged their newsfeed setting so that every two days or so, everybody's newsfeed switched back to the "Top Stories" setting.  If you will notice, your more provocative (and entertaining) friends get censored in favor of more progressive content and screens out more stimulating conservative content. And very recently, they changed the procedure for switching your newsfeed back to "Most Recent" so that most people have a hard time figuring out how to get back to where they see their friends' posts again. Facebook is clearly using this quiet resetting of your newsfeed to calm you down and manipulate your emotions and make you more peaceful and receptive to the message Mr. Zuckerberg thinks you ought to be seeing.

The "Top Stories" setting on Facebook is simply private corporate censorship and since Facebook is clearly a left-leaning corporate entity, it's also, in essence, censorship if content not approved by the Democrat Party. Fortunately, you can still switch your newsfeed so that you can once again get those posts from your grandpa complaining about how Joe Biden and that Pelosi woman are ruining the country. To be fair, Facebook also does censor ax murderers, the more open sorts of terrorists and most pornography. They don't trust their members to unfriend such people and, of course, conservatives like me get lumped in with pedophiles, serial killers, mass murderers and Ted Cruz and screened out of my friends' newsfeeds.

I on the other hand, live on the hidden island of the "Most Recent" Facebook newsfeed where I see the whole glorious flood of posts by my thousand some-odd friends. And you can too!  There are two ways to fix it so you see everyone and at the same time confound Facebook's Department of Acceptable Content Moderation.

#1.  The Easy Way - To make sure Facebook doesn't switch you to their heavily censored "Top Stories" newsfeed setting, download an app that Facebook doesn't like called "Facebook Purity". Just click on the link I just gave you and download the app. Once installed you can just click on FBP icon the program places at the top of your Facebook pages and you have control over Facebook at your fingertips. You'll have to update it a few times a year as Facebook generally eliminates FBP's access every time they update. Fortunately, the developer is never far behind in updating the app so you get it back in short order. I toss the guy a few bucks once in a while to support his efforts.

#2  The Hard Way - The Newsfeed link in the left column on the Home newsfeed page is now disabled. The other links work, but you can't click on Newsfeed like you used to and change the setting. You have to follow a more convoluted and distinctly unintuitive process. And frankly, I can't find anyone on the Internet who has figured out the new system for changing your newsfeed back to Most Recent. Using Facebook these days is like revisiting the Soviet Union or George Orwell's fictional Oceania where control over the proletariat is maintained by eliminating or redefining words, rewriting history or making it impossible to do things that might stimulate actual thinking which might lead to discontent which might lead to a revolt against the oligarchy.

I found a December 2020 article in Distractify that  explained how to reset your newsfeed after the 2020 "update' of Facebook. After 'splaining how to reset the newsfeed, the author noted, "...If you're finding yourself unable to find the option on the next update, chances are, following the same above steps will bring you back to the function. The order may change, and the icon, but hopefully, it won't ever disappear for good." Well in Mark Zuckerberg's plans for a dystopian social media future, hopefully didn't happen. The December procedure doesn't work anymore. Apparently it was too intuitive and people could still figure out how to get uncensored content.

So for now, see #1, because since the last time I changed my newsfeed manually, they eliminated the button that does so and substituted a button that doesn't work. For now FBP is the only way to reset your newsfeed.

One thing nice about having to use Facebook Purity is that it gives you some other great controls for managing what Facebook tosses across your screen. You can block things, improve the looks of your page and other fun stuff. So for now, until someone finds the secret door to changing your newsfeed, downloading FBP seems to be our only solution.

You know, Orwell's 1984 was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual for America's would-be oligarchy.

© 2021 by Tom King

 

 

How to Find Your Missing Friends Again

Welcome to the wonderful world of corporate censorship. We already know that Google, Youtube, Twitter and Facebook shadow ban conservatives. One of the irritating consequences of Facebook's busybody policies is the disappearance of your friends from your Facebook Newsfeed. Here's how it works:

1. On the Home Facebook page, newsfeed, Facebook sets the default to Top Stories.
   
2. Even if you set the newsfeed to something else, every day or two, Facebook resets your newsfeed back to Top Stories.
3. "Top Stories" is Facebook's edited newsfeed. Their algorithm edits out things they don't think you ought to see. It tends, in my case to shift posts I see in a distinctly leftward direction.
4. If you want to continue to see your friends' posts, you have to keep changing the feed back to "Most Recent".  
5. Or you can do this:

Download a program called Facebook Purity or as it's now known "Fluff-Busting Purity".

This app loads on top of your browser to provide a dashboard for Facebook that allows you to adjust settings, block spam and ads and, my favorite bit - it can prevent Facebook from resetting your newsfeed to "Top Stories" and blocking your friends so that you can't see them on your feed. It puts the letters FBP at the top of the Facebook webpages. You just click on it and select the settings you want. It makes your Facebook time more like what you want instead of what they want.

There use to be a way to reset your newsfeed to "Most Recent", but in late 2020 they hid that button under several layers of menus. Then in late March 2021, they did away with the link to change back to "most recent."  Now, without the FBP app, you simply cannot find a consistent way to switch your newsfeed back from the FB "Top Stories" censored feed and you'll miss all your conservative friends' very entertaining memes. And you will be effectively shadow-banned if you post conservative things.

Click the link above, download FBP and install it. Once you set the newsfeed you'll see your friends again. Facebook's going to hate that!

© 2020 by Tom King