The World's Common Tater

I know that being on Facebook isn’t cool anymore, but I’m still there(because I’m not cool) and get more interaction there than any other social media site. I share my blog posts on Facebook and routinely share articles and news I think my friends will enjoy. This week, I seem to have been caught up in Facebook’s crackdown on fake and spam accounts.

I am an Atlanta Braves fan living outside Baltimore. When the Orioles traded two players to Atlanta, making that now five former Orioles on my team, I shared the article I saw on Twitter to Facebook. An hour or so later I had a notification telling me that Facebook had removed the post because it looked like spam. I clicked the “this isn’t spam” thing, complained about it, and it was restored. It was a minor annoyance and means nothing in the general scheme of things. I complained(because that’s what I do) and I moved on with life. It is annoying, though, that the majority of my feed these days are people sharing quizzes, “what would you look like as the opposite sex” things, articles from dubious sites, etc and they somehow all make it through the screening process. I recently shared a Snopes article after multiple people shared a prayer request that has been floating around since 2010 and is not even an accurate account of the original incident. That seems OK to Facebook.  But an accurate article about a baseball trade” THIS SHALL NOT STAND! Ok, maybe I am still a little bitter.

Yesterday, I noticed a blog post didn’t share to Facebook and then I received an email from WordPress telling me that Facebook no longer allows WordPress to share posts to a personal profile. I can share it to a page(and now this will post to my Tater page) or I can share it manually to my profile. I just can’t have it share automatically to my personal profile unless I make it a page instead. So, it can still be there, I just have to use one extra step to get it there. I guess they think if I’m a Russian agent trying to topple our democracy that one extra step will thwart me.

“I have to post this article that will destroy America manually? That will take another 30 seconds. Damn you Facebook! America lives to see another day!”

On the plus side, Facebook seems determined to save my friends from my Tater posts. I’m sure they all slept better last night.