Facebook Tattle

I posted this on Facebook this morning.

“[There’s] all kinds of social media criticism this morning of so-called mainstream media covering the Iowa caucus last night, but I disagree. It was a good reminder that Americans can be … just ignorant.”

Originally I’d typed “that Americans can be just horrible and stupid” and immediately got a message from Facebook saying I might get in trouble for that comment. So I changed it to ignorant. Was it the stupid or the horrible that got the attention?

I don’t know.

And it survived, that post. Still, it’s tame compared to the truly horrible stuff my brother has said with virtually no penalty. And it was pretty harsh compared to something I’d posted three or so months ago that got me thrown into Facebook Jail. (My first time!)

Let me tell you that story. My sin was that I posted a link to a story, which goes like this:

In June, the city council of Murfreesboro enacted an ordinance outlawing “indecent exposure, public indecency, lewd behavior, nudity or sexual conduct”. The rule did not explicitly mention homosexuality, but LGBTQ+ people in the town quickly realized that the ordinance references 21-72 of the city code, which categorizes homosexuality as an act of indecent sexual conduct.

The ordinance was essentially a covert ban on LGBTQ+ existence. …

Earlier this month [Nov.], following a legal challenge from the ACLU of Tennessee, the government of Murfreesboro removed “homosexuality” from the list of acts defined as “public indecency” by the city code. The small victory came after officials repeatedly refused to issue permits for the BoroPride Festival, citing the new ordinance.

To introduce the link, I did not use the quote above. Instead, I said the Murfreesboro GOP government had passed an ordinance that allowed two people in local government to decide what is publicly obscene. (I left out names.) I also said it looked like these two men were trying to outlaw a way of being that includes several of my friends. I did not say gay, I did not say homosexual. I did say that this law was “a bit ridiculous here in the 21st century.”

That’s all.

I also did not say that the stupid, stupid Republican Murfreesboro government had to pay half a million dollars to settle with the BoroPride Festival.

And yet I was thrown in Facebook Jail. Here’s what really confuses me: Facebook said I’d violated their cybersecurity rules. They said, “We don’t allow people to try to gather sensitive information or share malicious software.” They said they did not allow people (me) to:

>Get access to accounts or data without permission
>Encourage someone to give away their password or username
>Use phishing or malicious software to get someone’s login info
>Gather sensitive information or share malicious software

Huh? I wouldn’t know how to do that even if I wanted to. I did post a link to an article. But usually if I go to a dodgy website, my own system tells me not to go there, and I don’t. That didn’t happen here. So what the actual what?

I figure someone reported me or a bot picked up a word it didn’t like. I was given a chance to protest the decision—which I did—and was told I’d hear something within four days—which didn’t happen. Never did hear from them.

Good grief, Facebook.

 

 

 

Reading Around the World

Back in September [I wrote this nine years ago] I was absolutely intrigued by this article about a gal who spent a year reading one book—not travel writing; literature—from each of the world’s 196 independent countries. At the beginning of the year, I’d thought I myself might have a Year of Reading* Non-American Books developing—or at least a year of reading books outside the American culture I’m used to—but then a friend had a book published, and there was a memoir I absolutely couldn’t wait to read, and before long that international list I’d had goin’ on all spring had become a little less international (though no less interesting).

The whole idea of Ann Morgan’s Reading the World: Postcards from my Bookshelf really tripped my trigger. (We’ll set aside the idea that Morgan had to read four to five books a week, a grueling pace that allows little time for appreciation, much less comprehension or retention. This is, essentially, a stunt, and I’m fine with that.) I posted the article on Facebook and a few of us had a lively discussion about it.

The article features this link, which is a list of books Morgan considered for the project, categorized by country. OK, but if you look closely, you see she has Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief listed under Australia. And sure enough, Zusak is Australian. But the book doesn’t deal with Australian subject matter—it’s set in Germany during World War 2. So what makes that book Australian, exactly? Just off the top of my head, I think you’d get more Australian “flavor” from Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, which is set in Melbourne. (And which I really enjoyed.)

You could go on down Morgan’s list and find other books that don’t necessarily meet the criteria I’ve imagined—American Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible is set mostly in Africa, for example—so what’s that “postcards from my bookshelf” in the subtitle really mean? I thought it was a grand idea but I was curious about the methodology.

Which made me wonder, of course, What’s on my bookshelf? (Short answer? Nowhere near 196 countries.) My bookshelf exercise made me think a little more about methodology. (It’s not as easy as you think. Morgan chose independent countries, but my little highly unscientific list eschews the UK as a category and opts instead for England, Scotland, and Wales, because political boundaries notwithstanding, those are very different regions—just ask the Welsh or the Scots.) I’ve listed here only books I’ve read—predominantly contemporary authors who write about their country of birth or a country in which they lived long-term, and in such a way we might consider it a “postcard” from that place. Call it my “flavor list.”

• Afghanistan
  The Kite Runner  / Khaled Hosseini **
  A Thousand Splendid Suns / Khaled Hosseini
  

• Australia
  Seven Types of Ambiguity / Elliot Perlman

• Botswana
  The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series / Alexander McCall Smith

• Canada
  Cat’s Eye / Margaret Atwood
  Alias Grace / Margaret Atwood
  The Blind Assassin / Margaret Atwood
  the Armand Gamache series / Louise Penny
• England
  Possession / A. S. Byatt
  Fever Pitch / Nick Hornby
  The Rotter’s Club / Jonathan Coe

• France
  The Diving Bell and the Butterfly / Jean-Dominique Bauby
  The Elegance of the Hedgehog / Muriel Barbery

• Germany
  The Reader / Bernhard Schlink
  Group Portrait with Lady / Heinrich Böll 

• India
  Beyond the Beautiful Forevers / Katherine Boo

• Ireland
  The Gathering / Ann Enright
  the Barrytown Trilogy / Roddy Doyle

• Italy
  Marcovaldo / Italo Calvino

• Kenya
  Out of Africa / Isak Dinesen

• The Netherlands
  The Assault / Harry Mulisch

• Russia
  The Gulag Archipelago / Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich / Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  The First Circle / Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  Cancer Ward / Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  Doctor Zhivago / Boris Pasternak

• Rwanda
  Letters Home / Fergal Keane

• Scotland
  the Inspector Rebus series / Ian Rankin
  the Isabel Dalhousie series / Alexander McCall Smith
  Glue / Irvine Welsh

• South Africa
  July’s People / Nadine Gordimer
  Cry, the Beloved Country / Alan Paton

• Spain
  Soldiers of Salamis / Javier Cercas
  The Shadow of the Wind / Carlos Ruiz Zafón

• Sri Lanka
  Anil’s Ghost / Michael Ondaatje

• Sweden
  Borkman’s Point / Håkan Nesser

• Wales
  The Grey King / Susan Cooper

As you can see, I haven’t been all that adventurous. I’ve always enjoyed reading about other countries and cultures, but my criteria for this post were very narrow. I haven’t checked Morgan’s final list—you can click on each country name in her book list and see which title she settled on—but I suspect she also wanted a flavor list.

In our Facebook discussion, my friend Michelle said, “One of the things I like about reading non-American/non-UK authors is the different perspective on society in general, and our times in particular. I read [a lot of books from] Rwanda because I was trying to understand what happened in that society twenty years ago and going to the source made more sense than the Westerners’ explanations.” That’s it exactly.

So I was pleased to find an interview with Morgan that asked for a list of her favorites. She offers nine—Albania, Canada, Mongolia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Tajikistan, and Togo. If those don’t suit, here’s a list of twenty international titles from Publishers Weekly. Aren’t those covers interesting? Be sure to let me know which one you read first. 🙂

* You do understand that when I talk about what I’m reading, I mean my pleasure reading, not my work reading, right?
** Morgan expressed a little Khaled Hosseini fatigue, but I enjoyed both these books.