SF author Rebecca Solnit had her Facebook account suspended after she posted an essay about the LA protests, but Facebook undid the suspension about 24 hours later, and this all likely happened because of the slapdash AI that Facebook uses for content moderation.

We’ve recently had newfound interest in the work of San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit, because of her very well-reviewed new collection of essays just published in the book No Straight Road Takes You There. Yet that is not why Rebecca Solnit is in the news today.

Rebecca Solnit is in the news because Facebook suspended her account in the wake of her post about the current LA protests, according to the Chronicle. But Facebook then unbanned the account within a day, claiming the ban was “an error.”

The "incriminating" post from Monday is seen above. “I also believe that those of us who are older, whiter, safer from the threats of state violence do not have the moral ground to lecture the younger, browner and blacker, more directly impacted on what they should and should not do,” she writes in her a Facebook post, with an external link to her own website. “One thing to remember is that they'll claim we're violent no matter what; the justification for this ongoing attack on immigrants and people who resemble immigrants in being brown is the idea that America is suffering an invasion and in essence only a certain kind of white person belongs here in this place that was never all white.”

And by Tuesday, Solnit’s Facebook account was in limbo. “Facebook decided to suspend my account because of a piece (below) I wrote Monday about violence which in no way advocates for it (but does point out who is violent in the current ruckus),” Solnit said in a Bluesky post whose visibility is restricted.

Solnit included a screenshot of Facebook’s rationale, which said, “Your account, or activity on it, doesn’t follow our Community Standards on account integrity.”

That’s obviously quite vague! Solnit appealed the decision, but Facebook responded that the account “still doesn’t follow our Community Standards on account integrity. You cannot request another review of this decision.”

The Chronicle published their piece on this Wednesday afternoon. Within 30 minutes of publication, Solnit’s Facebook account was restored. And as seen above, Chronicle writer Lily Janiak says that "Facebook's communications staff got back to me saying their decision, which Solnit was told she couldn't appeal, was a mistake.” So, Facebook was clearly aware that there was media coverage of this when they decided to reverse their decision.

Facebook/Meta spokesperson Andy Stone tweeted a response tweet at 1:30 pm on Wednesday that “This was an error and the account has been restored.” This continues Facebook and Meta executives’ curious trend of sorting out Facebook controversies on the rival Twitter/X platform instead of, you know, their own platform.

We still don’t know with certainty why Solnit’s account was banned or flagged. But Facebook’s content moderation policies spell out that “Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is central to our content review process. AI can detect and remove content that goes against our Community Standards before anyone reports it.”

So yeah, probably AI bot going a little haywire.

Per the Chronicle, Solnit herself blamed Facebook’s “inane algorithms that often delete posts.” Solnit said in a post after her account was restored that “My account wasn't just suspended. When I asked for a review of the suspension I was told my account was disabled and there would be no further appeal. Permanent out.”

And we can’t help but suspect it’s a factor here that Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg have definitely taken a Trumper turn over the last year or so, or rather, a position of cowardly appeasement to the Trump administration’s bullying. They changed content moderation policies to appease the right wing, added the wholly unqualified UFC president and MAGA figure Dana White to their board of directors, and gave $1 million to the Trump inauguration.

Regardless, here is a link to the full Rebecca Solnit essay whose post got her banned from Facebook, entitled “Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence.”

“I think maybe it's begun, the bigger fiercer backlash against the Trump Administration which is itself a violent backlash against every good thing that's happened over the past several decades,” Solnit writes. “The advance of rights for nature, women, children, indigenous peoples, BIPOC and immigrants/refugees, queer people, trans people, people with disabilities, workers, the right of us all to be free from being poisoned by food, water, air."

Related: Meta Playing Hardball to Prevent Sales of Ex-Employee’s Tell-All Book [SFist]

Image: Rebecca Solnit (Photo by Rebecca Sapp/WireImage, Getty Images)