Yesterday I attempted to share a post about This Day in World War II, which Facebook informed me was in violation of their “community standards.”

The post was a simple recounting of the events on this day in 1944. They are put together by Mark Olivares, who puts a great deal of effort and time into his three daily history posts (WWII Today 75 Years Ago, WWII 85 Years Ago Today, and Today 50 Years Ago). The idea that anything in history goes “against Facebook’s community standards” is, on the one hand laughable, but it is also symptomatic of the overall issues that people are beginning to have with Social Media in general and Facebook in specific.

It has become well documents that over the past couple of years, Facebook (and Google) have begun to strangle information to users. Worse than that, they have literally begun to control content creation. In other words, instead of merely presenting to you a selection of various choices and viewpoints, Facebook has decided not just to limit those choices, but like an ethnic food restaurant, they have decided what dishes can even be made in the first place.

So I see two things here that speak to cultural issues here.

My Grandfather (of blessed memory) used to say that the Sunday Comics in the newspaper and NFL football were “Communist conspiracies” to get people out of the church. He never imagined anything like Facebook, which has literally replaced Church.

Literally.

And, as the Church did once upon a time, Facebook has decided what you can and cannot hear. But even more than that, we have become techno-dependant. Another word for that is “lazy.” Which is exactly what Ray Bradbury was talking about in his novel. We blame Facebook for burning all the books.

Yet… we let them do it…