The Forbes Beef (or a case of the most benign kind of censorship).

 I have a confession. I haven’t really been using my twitter or keeping up with it. In fact I haven’t really been engaging in social media much at all. I do use almost all the services. I have accounts and I generally only use them to interact with friends. I’ve kept things pretty private and pretty low key because I don’t feel like social media should be used as an outlet to the world but rather a way to stay connected with your people and interests.I wind up struggling with the idea of “getting out there” and making my presence known. So I decided to start making some things more public. That included my twitter timeline. Most of my timeline is dedicated to things that only my friends would MAYBE care about. I think that I should only be tweeting and posting about positive things because the internet seems to be so full of negativity. Sometimes though I post about a bad service experience or when I notice things like the following.Yesterday I read a story on the FORBES website about The Undertaker. The article was surprisingly informative and on point. Which is odd because I generally find FORBES a bit all over the map (especially on the web) when it comes to topics. Mainly I come across articles like this and this about another interest of mine. If you don’t want to read either of those articles I’ll summarize and just say there is a great amount of misunderstanding and misconception about the topic of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency (or alt coins). Which seems really odd that a business magazine seems to have a better understanding of the WWE than they do of a financial marketplace. So I decided to vent and tweeted this:

“@Forbes the business magazine that knows more about @WWE than @bitcoin”

Pretty benign right? I can hardly imagine anyone at Forbes being anything but a droopy dog about it. It posted to my twitter and it automatically cross posted it to my Facebook. As lunch time neared I did a quick scan of my social media and even saw my twitter post and the cross post on Facebook confirming that it was there. I went to lunch. I came back to work. I worked. My break was coming up and I did a quick scan of my social media and I noticed something. The tweet was gone. It had just vanished. That’s weird I thought. I checked Facebook and the cross post was also deleted. I thought maybe I hadn’t actually posted the item, but was certain that I had and even more certain I hadn’t been the one who deleted it. Then I remembered I had proof. There was this.

I use IFTTT to save all my tweets. So if it gets posted it gets saved. I knew I had posted it. I knew it. I did. There it was. Now I was just left with the what just happened and why? I really can’t imagine that someone somewhere decided that my post did not need to be there. That it was offensive in some way. That me expressing my opinion over such a benign issue as that needed to be removed from the internet. Especially because I have so few followers which I actively manage. So I began began reposting and posting things just to see if anything else would happen. I posted a Facebook only message about the event. I reposted my tweet. I waited to see if anything else would happen. The next morning (today) and my second tweet remained as did my Facebook reaction post. Then I wondered about if you post something on Twitter and deleted it would it automatically delete your Facebook cross post as well. So I did that and it did not. You can check my Facebook timeline for this post.

“This is a system test. Please ignore.”

You can see it’s there and posted from twitter and if you go back to my twitter you can see that it is no longer there because I deleted it. So this is extremely weird and worrisome. Not so much that this happened to me. Overall this event has had zero effect. The worrisome part in all of this is that SOMEONE had my Twitter post AND Facebook post deleted and I wasn’t even notified. Which has to give anyone pause as to how and why would someone do that. I’d like to think this is all just some kind of glitchy coincidence but unfortunately there are too many things that would have all had to happen at the same time for me to believe that. At the same time I fully admit I’m hard pressed to think that someone conspired to censor an opinion but what other option is there? Strange times ahead my friends.