When Facebook morphs into a digital prison

You’re probably already aware that Facebook severely limits user participation but it can a lot worse: it can turn into a digital prison.

That’s right, people, Facebook isn’t as friendly or “cool” as they claim to be.

On the one hand, the Facebook service invites you to create a profil, build up pages and join groups but what happens if you’re asking to connect with too many friends or post several [non-spam] messages in group boards, in a short period of time? Well, you get warned, which restrains from participating in “your community” furthermore until they decide you’ve “learned your lesson”. Then, if you wish to exchange information actively again, you can get your account deactivated.

Now, losing your account at Facebook means that you can never log back in again with your email address of contact data, which forces you to forge an alternative identity to connect back with your “friends” and “groups”.

That’s very scary.

Why?

Because Facebook has all the tools in place to repress free speech and freedom to associate.

Right now, if you post between 10 and 20 messages in various groups you’re a member of, you’re likely to get warned.

If you’re actively campaigning for a cause, it’s NORMAL to post between 10 and 20 message on various like-minded group boards but for Facebook, that’s seen as ABUSE and their “monitoring system” locks up your account, akin to a digital prison.

And the scariest part is that Facebook can lower the “abuse and threat” threshold to just a few message a day, if that suits them. So if a civil emergency were to pop-up and you’d want to warn everyone of soemthing big coming their way, Facebook would NOT be the place to do it because they track and penalize those who use their system too “actively”.

Nobody knows for sure how the decision to warn a user happens.

Like all such “threat detection management systems”, the “recipe” to pinpoint the “abusers” is private and therefore, cofnidential. However, countless users have been warned and deactivate so their experience speaks volumes about the real consequences of using Facebook too much — even though nobody know exactly how much is “too much”.

For all these reasons and others, you need to think up alternative ways to connect with “your community” that doesn’t involve going through Facebook.

It’s easy for you to join and use Facebook, that’s a given but it’s a dangerous proposition because the moment you’ll need to communicate actively with the people who matter to you, like in a crisis, that digital “control matrix” might restrict you from doing so, if it’s in their interest to do so.

Since a growing number of serious publications are identifying Facebook as a CIA front, everyone should be very concerned about this huge digital holding ground which can morph into a prison, in the blink of an eye.