Facebook is now relying a bit too much on the disgruntled artificial intelligence-driven hamsters that operate its servers to carry out administrative duties, duties that obviously only a Real Person(TM) should be doing. Details below the beautiful art-decoesque orange swirlie, if that hasn't been blocked too.
It seems that by the look of the Facebook Help Center (which I have been browsing quite often for a while now because of the ^^ abovementioned issue) that many, many people across the board have been automatically blocked from using many Facebook features:
1) commenting on public pages.
2) creating new public pages.
3) administering their current pages.
4) "liking" individual comments on public pages.
5) posting non-offensive images, such as funny lolcat memes, in response to posts on public pages.
These blocks are across the board: no warnings, no contacts, no explanations. Also, they are absolutely not oriented on one end, either end, of the political spectrum. These blocks are put in place on people who might have strong political opinions but have absolutely no history of posting abuse or spam. People who have never even created a page before, and in fact probably don't know how even to do so, are blocked from creating pages.
I'm writing this DKos diary about it because other than the very few pages or friends' pages where these users can still post, these blocked folks have been pretty much silenced. And it is very frustrating, indeed.
Facebook has no solid policy in place, as far as I know, of what constitutes spam or abusive posting. Combined with the ease of creating fake complaints and the zero contact you get when you find you are suddenly unable to communicate with those of like mind, this leaves many wondering, "If Facebook considers my posting habits needing to be changed, how can I change them if I don't know what I did?"
Both conservatives and progressives are systematically being silenced, not only from pages that should be protected by the First Amendment, such as our govermental administration's pages, but even from pages they wholeheartedly support. Some folks in the Help Center are sqawking that only their political views are being shut down; this is patently false.
Stop looking for black helicopters, folks. There aren't any.
I am an administrator of a page myself, and I know for a fact that the admin settings of individual public pages and pages of individuals have more than enough controls available to block or ban troublesome users or bots.
Kossacks, if you or a loved one or even your Coulter/Limbaugh-shipping Uncle Fred find(s) yourself/themselves suddenly blocked on Facebook with no explanation, please refer them to this handy dandy petition on change.org.
By the way, many folks are spamming up the Help Center with that goofy "uprate my post as helpful plox!!1!! so I can get unbanned!!" post.
Don't do that. It doesn't work and could...well...get you blocked.
(Am I blocked yet?)