Facebook, The Nib, and The New York Times

After spending the morning wrestling with The New York Times, I can point people to this article about Facebook moderation and the problem they have with satire.

The example they printed of a comic strip that Facebook mistakenly removed from its site, and then allowed back on, was one of mine, the one I did on masks last summer.

 

Somehow Facebook flagged this comic's appearance on The Nib as a dangerous statement about Covid and masks, and removed it from The Nib's page.  It wasn't long before it was reinstated, because the concern was obviously an error in failing to see the irony, but it did reveal a blind spot in Facebook's efforts to moderate its content.

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But I was totally blindsided by the article this morning.  I was happily reading it because it was about my pal Matt Bors and his site The Nib, and then suddenly there was my comic, but without the Tom the Dancing Bug header, without the By Ruben Bolling byline, and without any attribution at all.  No mention of me, as though the comic was created by some kind of Nib algorithm.

I had to spend the morning wrestling with the situation, but I finally did get in touch with the editor of the article, who was very apologetic and took full responsibility.  They added an attribution, and they said they'd look into replacing the image with the full image, as the comic originally ran, including the header and byline.  We'll see.

 

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Anyway, I've been focused on my own little drama of attribution, but the problem for The Nib explained in the article is an existential one for The Nib.  And the good news is that Matt tells me that The Times getting in touch with Facebook for the article caused Facebook to finally take The Nib off "restricted distribution" probation status.  

For now.